Animals and Nature

And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?

Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful – but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Not all horses were born equal. A few were born to win.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

Door: What a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.

A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

The idea of calm exists in a sitting cat.

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not more of a pastime to her than she is to me?

The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence. It may be a theatrical “encore.”

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.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

The experience of drought and dust storms remains central to the psychology of the prairie west; more than the intermittent affluence of postwar decades, it tints a westerner’s outlook on life. He continues to live in next year country, where he smokes a pack of hope a day.

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.