#natur

That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea--both of us calm--and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work....when death--black waves!--no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it. ↗

— Juan Ramón Jiménez

#life-work #nature-writing #poetry #death

He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#fear #human-nature #life #spirit #death

All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind. ↗

— John Lubbock

#nature #reward #love

Big lots,' I said, seeing the eighty-year-old oaks and shady lawns. The houses were set way back and had iron fences and stone drives. The harder to hear your neighbors scream, my dear,' was David’s answer, and I sent my head up and down in agreement. ↗

— Kim Harrison

#humor #rachel-morgan #romance #supernatural #vampire

Louis-Cesare slowly pulled himself into a half-standing position against the side of the winery.'What? Did you think one little mage was going to do me in?' He swallowed hard. 'Hell, that was just a warm-up. ↗

— Karen Chance

#damphir #dorina #fiction #humor #mage

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#metaphor #mind #nature #change

Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid. ↗

— Aberjhani

#existence #fear #human-nature #change

When the world has changed and the rivers run dry ad the forests grow brown will we realize that we don't run the world. We must understand that Nature is what helped us into this beautiful planet, so we must help her in return. ↗

— Veronica White

#nature #beauty

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#inside-out #change

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. ↗

— Mark Kurlansky

#ecology #evolution #extinction #humans #natural-world