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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #nature
Granddad once told me that to truly love this life, you need to know its darkest corners. But if you can bring a bit of sunshine to the sunless, it can only be for the good. I mean, what else are we really here for on this earth? Think about it some day, when the spring mornings look so golden and green. ↗
Having spent a long time in open spaces, whether sea or desert, it is a luxury to be able to take refuge in towns with narrow streets which provide a fragile fortress against the assaults of the infinite. There is such a sense of security against the boundless there, even if the murmur of the wave or the silence of the sands still pursue one through tortuous corridors. The winds, despite their subtle spirits, are themselves lost in the vestibules of this labyrinth and, unable to find a way through, whistle and turn in turbulence like demented dervishes. They will not break through the walls of this den in which life still pulsates in the shadows of humanity's black sun. ↗
A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely. ↗
Jorden tilhører ikke mennesket. Det er menneskene, der tilhører Jorden. De duftende blomster er vore søstre, og hesten, den mægtige ørn, for ikke at tale om elgen, er vore brødre. Og hvordan kan man købe eller sælge noget som helst? For hvem ejer varmen i luften eller lyden af vinden i træerne? Og saften i grenene bærer erindringen om dem, der har levet før os. Og lyden af bækkens mumlen er er vores forfaders stemme. Og vi må lære vores børn, at jorden under deres fødder er forfædrenes akse, og at alt, hvad der overgår Jorden også overgår os, og hvis mennesket spytter på jorden, spytter det på sig selv. ↗
#love #nature #philosophy #respect #symbiosis
I don't believe that the Scots were always frugal, now that I have read our mean history. Once the land was without mankind and was covered with trees - most of these heaths and moors are modern - and heather grows on the moor because the peasants snapped the limbs they could reach from the trees as high as they could reach, which slowed the growth of the trees, and their pigs rooted up saplings in the forest, and with branches beyond reach men chopped down the trees, trees that had leeched the shallow soil but at least held it with their roots, so that with fewer trees the rains carried off the thin layer of soil, trees became more scarce, winds blew wilder, dry land grew drier and wet land grew more wet, as one peasant here and another peasant there, gathering infinitesimal sticks for paltry winter fires, first raised the trees into the shapes of trees in a medieval hunting scene, and a courtier or if you will a laird might ride horseback through the forest, which looked as cultivated as he did, and he might hunt stags or roes visible among the visible trunks of allegorical trees, as allegory to us was naturalism to them, but their trim and vertical forests quickly deforested to vacant heath and moor, sheep and cattle grazing, nothing much taller than heather, and stone cottages built, a small dairy, smoke curling from chimneys in the morning, thick blue-grey ascending into blue, the old landshape become a landscape, and stones shaped into walls that curved with hilly fields, poisonously quaint, so that modern Scotland-Scotland by the seventeenth century-has been gardened, with no un-policied nature anywhere, and the only worse yet to come the townscape, the rustic villages, towns shaped with a view to the view, town hall spire rhyming with church steeple, a skyline constructed because they saw themselves as others would see them as they drove around the curve of the road, and they wanted to be ready for them, one tree left at the margin of a hill to catch the sunset in its branches, a grove of trees in the middle of a city as a park or square or green, the whole of Scotland a manshape, and the interferences of men applauded everywhere by men as they drove out to view the scenery and viewed the sum of infinitesimal greeds, the history of Scottish appetites, uncalculated and incalculable intrusions into the forest until the forest became a moor... ("Interim") ↗
Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, - men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; and their descendant to this day always acts as if the house were his camp, - wears his hat at all hours, tumbles himself about, and puts his heels on the tops of chairs or mantel-pieces, just as his father rolled on the green sward, and put his upon trees or logs, - keep all the windows and doors open, winter and summer, that he may get air enough for his great lungs, - calls everybody "stranger", with nonchalant bonhommie, and is altogether the frankest, easiest, most jovial creature living. ↗
#men
What the Court really has refused to recognize is the fundamental interest all individuals have in controlling the nature of their intimate associations. ↗
