#nature

At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, ‘Come down to the water.’ It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look, I see fire: that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#landscape #life #nature #wisdom #beauty

If you were silent Flight of herons on dark sky... Oh! Autumn snowflakes! ↗

— Sokan

#herons #nature-s-beauty #beauty

Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature. ↗

— Julia Ward Howe

#debt #like #marriage #nature #owe

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul. ↗

— Edvard Munch

#eye #includes #inner #nature #only

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#bloodshed #detail #exceed #hard #harder

Art is about expressing the true nature of the human spirit in whatever way one wishes to express it. If it is honest, it is beautiful. If it is not honest, it is obvious. ↗

— Corin Nemec

#art #beautiful #express #expressing #honest

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque. ↗

— Corin Nemec

#beautiful #even #grotesque #honest #me

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks. ↗

— Howard Nemerov

#chiefly #come #eliot #history #i

You can change the circumstances but you can never change man's inner nature. ↗

— Ron Perlman

#circumstances #inner #man #nature #never

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God. ↗

— Kenneth L. Pike

#conform #god #i #i do #nature