OUTDOOROSOPHY
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn! - Logan Pearsall Smith
Man's heart away from nature becomes hard. - Standing Bear
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! - John Muir
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. - George Washington Carver
I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. - William Hazlitt
I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods. Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup. - Wendell Berry
And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release - out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know? - Carl Sandburg, Good Morning America, 1928
You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. - Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons, 1964
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. - Galileo
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars. - Walt Whitman
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. - John Muir
Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. - George Washington Carver
How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. - e.e. cummings
The poetry of the earth is never dead. - John Keats
I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. - Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. - Lao Tzu
The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. - e.e. cummings
The sky is the daily bread of the eyes. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. - William Shakespeare
As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. - Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping
Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street. - William Blake
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. - Helen Keller
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? - Henry David Thoreau
Joy all creatures drink
At nature's bosoms...
- Friedrich von Schiller, "Ode to Joy," 1785, translated from German
They may as well have called the sun a ball of flaming joy. - Star Richés
Fieldes have eies and woods have eares. - John Heywood, 1565
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright, 14 August 1966
Innovative capitalists have tried to rewrite nature, but to no avail. - Astrid Alauda
Nature is the art of God. - Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635
The color of the mountains is Buddha's body; the sound of running water is his great speech. - Dogen
Nature is a writer's best friend. - Agavé Powers
To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
- John Keats, Sonnet XIV
After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. - Author Unknown
What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Nature hates calculators. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. - Albert Einstein
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. - Juvenal, Satires
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
- George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. - Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 22 December 1967
Once you have heard the lark, known the swish of feet through hill-top grass and smelt the earth made ready for the seed, you are never again going to be fully happy about the cities and towns that man carries like a crippling weight upon his back. - Gwyn Thomas
If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way. - Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
The moon is like a mystery novel, the sun like a motivational self-help book, and the stars a coffee table book of photography. The sky is the whole library, and God the librarian. - Pepper Giardino
You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. - St. Bernard
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me. - Thomas Jefferson
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life. - John Burroughs
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. - John Muir
God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars. - Martin Luther
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. - Henry David Thoreau
Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. - Osho
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. - Henry David Thoreau
The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven. - William Channing
Drinking nature is an unquenchable thirst. - Berri Clove
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. - Kahlil Gibran
A wise man can do no better than to turn from the churches and look up through the airy majesty of the wayside trees with exultation, with resignation, at the unconquerable unimplicated sun. - Llewelyn Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. - Eleonora Duse
I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God. - Alan Hovhaness
Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests. - Thornton Wilder
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. - William Shakespeare
The woods were made for the hunters of dreams,
The brooks for the fishers of song;
To the hunters who hunt for the gunless game
The streams and the woods belong.
- Sam Walter Foss
My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter? - Kotomichi
Human nature is just about the only nature some people experience. - Abigail Charleson
Nature is my medicine. - Sara Moss-Wolfe
I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that.... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. - Abraham Cowley
How many stanzas in the springtime breeze?
How plenty the raindrops? As He doth please.
There is no meter and there is no rhyme,
Yet God's poems always read in perfect time.
- Astrid Alauda, "Poems on Nature"
You know why there are so many whitefish in the Yellowstone River? Because the Fish and Game people have never done anything to help them. - Russell Chatham, Silent Seasons, 1978
Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. - Rachel Carson
Sunshine has no budget, the sea no red tape. - Jareb Teague
That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe. - John Berger, The Sense of Sight, 1980
Nature is man's teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence. - Alfred Billings Street
There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon. - Alice Meynell
Watching clouds roll by
on a sunny day
Who needs church?
Nature is divine.
- Carrie Latet
Art gallery? Who needs it? Look up at the swirling silver-lined clouds in the magnificent blue sky or at the silently blazing stars at midnight. How could indoor art be any more masterfully created than God's museum of nature? - Grey Livingston
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do. - Michel de Montaigne
Nature will not be admired by proxy. - Winston Churchill
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. - John Burroughs
I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn. - W.H. Hudson, The Book of a Naturalist, 1919
Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you'll find it there. - Robb Sagendorph
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inversnaid
I'll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time. - Emily Dickinson
Any man that walks the mead
In bud, or blade, or bloom, may find
A meaning suited to his mind.
- Alfred Tennyson
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. - Henry David Thoreau
I walked barefoot - the only way to walk on a muddy road. - Laurie Gough, "Light on a Moonless Night"
Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries. - John Muir
In the sky
an infinitude of hope,
a canvas of glory
all possibilities mine.
- Neroli Lambent
My profession is to always find God in nature. - Henry David Thoreau
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