Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
—Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine
The best time to plant an oak tree was twenty-five years ago. The second best time is today.
—James Carville
Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.
—George Carlin
The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
—John Muir
We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
—Susan Griffin
It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
—Gary Snyder
When I turn away from nature—human, animal, earthly or cosmic—when I turn away, that is, from intimate livingness, it means, simply and always, that I am afraid.
—Sanfor Goodman
A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
—P.D. James
That’s the problem with nature. Something’s always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let’s go watch TV.
—Bill Watterson
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
What sublime thoughts filled my mind as I bent to the wind, and trudged through the gorse and heather? I will tell you. I was wondering how much money I shall make out of my next book. Thus does nature keep us in touch with the great realities of existence.
—J.B. Morton
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo Antonioni
Of all the language sources, the loss of nature seems the saddest. A thousand times a day, nature—in the most ordinary of places—has something to tell or show us; something it wants us to touch, smell, or feel; something it wants all of us, not just the overtly artistic, to express.
—Joyce McGreevy
For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth.
—G. K. Chesterton
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
—Henry David Thoreau