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Quotes about nature

276 quotes from 143 people

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Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
Stephen Crane1871–1900The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Chapter XXIVIn context
- Hope
The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature.
Michael Crichton1942–2008Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
- Experience
Because we all share this small planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. That is not just a dream, but a necessity.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lamaborn 1935Nobel lecture (1989)
- War & Peace
What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!
Charles Darwin1809–1882Letter to J.D. Hooker, 13 July 1856
This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Science
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Science
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (2 of 2)In context
- Life & Death
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter VIIIn context
- Life & Death
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIIIIn context
- Science
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin1809–1882On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context
- Life & Death
- Science
How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
Emily Dickinson1830–1886Letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper.
There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Emily Dickinson1830–1886There’s a certain Slant of light (1890)In context
- Emotion
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,⁠—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Emily Dickinson1830–1886This is my letter to the World (1890)In context
- Writing
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Emily Dickinson1830–1886I taste a liquor never brewed (1861)In context