The Elders Speak: On Nature

We can never have enough of Nature.
Henry David Thoreau

To catch perhaps the joy that we all have in natural things in sunsets in the opening of a flower in running water, the wind in the pines, a thousand things. The joy that makes life thrilling and away from the prosaic.
Sigurd F. Olson

Fallen leaves open wider horizons to the seeing eye.
Hal Borland

Our minds, as well as our bodies, have a need of the out-of-doors. Our spirits too, need simple things, elemental things, the sun and wind and rain, moonlight and starlight, sunrise and mist and mossy forest trails, the perfume of dawn and the smell of fresh-turned earth and the ancient music of wind among trees.
Edwin Way Teale

The poetry of earth is never dead.
John Keats

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature....The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The deeper one enters into the study of Nature, the further one ventures into and along the by-paths that, like a mustic maze, thread Nature's realm in every direction, the broader and grander becomes the vista opend up for view .
Wilson A. Bentley

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
John Burroughs

To me, nature is sacred; trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
Mikhail Gorbachev

Earth and sky, wind and trees, rivers and fields, the mountains and the sea. All are excellent schoolmasters and teach some of us more than we could ever learn from books.
Author unknown

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.
Maya Angelou

Nature composes some of her lovliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
Theodore Roszak

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
Sir J. Lubbock

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever galling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John Muir

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

Perhaps, after all, our best thoughts come when we are alone. It is good to listen, not to voices but to the wind blowing, to the brook running cool over polished stones, to bees drowsy with the weight of pollen. If we attend to the music of the earth, we reach serenity. And then, in some unexplained way, we share it with others.
GladysTaber

There's a whisper on the night-wind,
there's a star agleam to guide us
And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go.
Robert Service

The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it.
John Burroughs, Boy and Man

In all things of nature there is something marvelous.
Aristotle

Believe one who knows: You will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistles

There is something to being on your own, whether in a blind, trout fishing or canoeing. Alone you get close to nature, you can listen, think, feel yourself a part of the water, at one with the trees and grasses, a part of the whole eternal picture.
Sigurd F. Olson

Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.
John Burroughs

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.
Thomas Moore

For observing nature, the best pace is a snail's pace.
Edwin Way Teale