#nature

Flat outstretched upon a mound Of earth I lie; I press my ear Against its surface and I hear Far off and deep, the measured sound Of heart that beats within the ground. And with it pounds in harmony The swift, familiar heart in me. They pulse as one, together swell, Together fall; I cannot tell My sound from earth's, for I am part Of rhythmic, universal heart. ↗

— Elizabeth Odell

#nature #nature

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts. ↗

— Ian Tattersall

#evolution #nature

schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue) ↗

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#nature

When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches. ↗

— Benjamin Percy

#children #marriage #nature-of-man #marriage

They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men. ↗

— Thomas Hardy

#men

Future warns us through current symptoms in nature. ↗

— Toba Beta

#nature #present #symptoms #warning #nature

Across the will of Nature Leads on the path of God; Not where the flesh delighteth The feet of Jesus trod. O bliss to leave behind us The fetters of the slave, To leave ourselves behind us, The graveclothes and the grave. We follow in His footsteps; What if our feet be torn? Where He has marked the pathway All hail the briar and the thorn! Scarce seen, scarce be heard, unreckoned, Despised, defamed, unknown Or heard but by our singing, On, children, ever on! ↗

— Gerhard Tersteegan

#nature

We are not native. We have no generations of Americans behind us. We have roots elsewhere. We are looking in from the outside. To me, that seems to be perfectly natural. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#americans #paul-auster #philip-roth #robert-mccrum #nature

We're living in a teetering tower of babble. A shaky reality of words. A DNA soup for disaster. The natural world destroyed, we're left with this cluttered world of language. ↗

— Chuck Palanhiuk

#language #words #nature

A male frigate bird blows up a wild red pouch on his neck. He can keep it puffed up for hours. It is his way of impressing the girls. ↗

— Julie Murphy

#children-s-books #courtship #frigate-bird #mating #nature