Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.

We can never have enough of nature.

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.

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wildness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against, it.

In nature two things do not occur—the wheel and good taste.

Man is embedded in nature.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

Those honour Nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything, even on theology.

Nature’s instructions are always slow, those of men are generally premature.

'Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than prudent and just.

God, I can push the grass apart / And lay my finger on Thy heart!

What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.

The child of civilization, remote from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity.

The visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of creation that a rational creature who will but seriously reflect on them cannot miss the discovery of a diety.

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

Deviation from Nature is deviation from happiness.

People thought they could explain and conquer nature—yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

The true return to nature is the definitive return to the elements—death.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them.

When a man says to me, “I have'the intensest love of nature,” at once I know that he has none.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew!

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

The peace of nature and of the innocent creatures of God seems to be secure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there to trouble its sanctity.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

To wish the greatness of our own country is often to wish evil to our neighbors. He who could bring himself to wish that his country should always remain as it is, would be a citizen of the universe.

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

The driving force of a nation lies in its spiritual purpose, made effective by free, tolerant but unremitting national will.

A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.

A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

A nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future.

We must recognize that every nation determines its policies in terms of its own interests.

Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.

A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.

There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

A nation will not count the sacrifice it makes, if it supposes it is engaged in a struggle for its fame, its influence and its existence.