"Nature never wears a mean appearance.
Neither does the wisest man extort her secret,
and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

"Go gentle ... into the green."
- Charles de Lint, Into the Green

"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from it's rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it,
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?"
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Out of this wood do not desire to go."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"Let us, like beings of intelligence and vision,
converse about life, nature and the future of the Earth."
- Jamie Delano, Batman: ManBat

"Anyone who thinks humans are not capable of so fouling their own nest that the land and the waters can no longer be productive just hasn't been paying attention."
- Molly Ivins

"He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais"

"Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."
- Francis Bacon

"In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous."
- Aristotle

"The heart of the hills is full of laughter."
- Charles de Lint, Svaha

"Night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"

"For stripping the bark of an oak tree, enough to tan the leather for a pair of woman's shoes, the fine is one cow-hide. The defendant must cover the bruised portion with a mixture of wet clay, new milk and cow-dung."
- from Ireland's ancient Brehon laws

"You can cut it down. You can tear out its roots.
But the forest's never really gone."
- Charles de Lint, Spiritwalk

"Each tree has its own name and its own personality. You have only to touch them and open your mind. Make your mind empty of all things that are about you, blank as a blue sky, and wait for the tree to give you its thoughts."
- Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland

"He that plants trees loves others besides himself."
- English proverb

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
- Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

"The poetry of the earth is ceasing never."
- Keats, "On the Grasshopper & Cricket"

"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophecy

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion
has broken Nature's social union."
- Robert Burns

"If you compare the City to the Forest, you may begin to wonder why it's man who goes around classifying himself as The Superior Animal."
- The Tao of Pooh

"Cheesecake doesn't grow in the forest."
- Jenny Long, ecology activist

"This planet is not terra firma.
It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for.
It's lonely.
It's small.
It's isolated, and there is no resupply.
And we are mistreating it."
- Scott Carpenter, astronaut

"Keep close to Nature's heart ... and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."
- John Muir

"There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... THEN there's a race -- between the trees on either side, who want to spread OUT, and the seedlings below, who race to grow UP.
Sometimes, you can make your own space."
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity;
so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."
- Henry David Thoreau

"As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair."
- Henry Beston, "The Outermost House"

"Nature does not make sense."
- Ayn Rand

"Nature is proving that she can't be beaten -- not by the likes of us. She's taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes."
- Robert E. Sherwood

"Always watch where you are going. Otherwise, you may step on a piece of the Forest that was left out by mistake."
- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

"I wanted others to believe. I thought if enough of us did, if we learned to care again about the wild places from which we'd driven the magic away, then maybe it would return."
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

"Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic.
Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall."
- Robert Frost

"Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."
- John Muir, naturalist

"We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
- Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

"In every grain of sand there is a story of earth."
- Rachel Carson, biologist and writer

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have the things about us."
- Iris Murdoch

"Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light."
- Theodore Roethke, poet

"How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through the fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas."
- Edward Abbey

"The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever."
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness."
- John Muir, naturalist

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there's really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."
- John Ruskin

"Nature does nothing uselessly."
- Aristotle

"Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we scarcely mark their progress."
- Charles Dickens

"All nature wears one universal grin."
- Henry Fielding

"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are consequences."
- R.G. Ingersoll

"The destruction of the forest is the beginning of the end of our world."
- O.R. Melling, The Light-Bearer's Daughter

"I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more."
- John Burroughs

"Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky, and the clustering stars above, seem to impart a quiet to the mind."
- Jonathan Edwards

"Sit in reverie, and watch the changing color of the waves that break
upon the idle seashore of the mind."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Earth laughs in flowers."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
- John Muir, naturalist

"The woods were made for the hunter of dreams, the brooks for the fishes of song."
- Sam Walter Foss

"Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished."
- Francis Bacon

"Since the whole world cannot buy a single spring day, of what avail to seek yellow gold?"
- Hsi Pei Lan

"If not checked many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know."
- Union of Concerned Scientists

"There is no more honorable thing any of us can do with our lives than to work to put part of the world off-limits to the activities of human beings."
- Dave Foreman

"He is happiest who hath power to gather wisdom from a flower."
- Mary Howitt

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them, half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen."
- Henry David Thoreau

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
- William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

"The distorted shapes and unexpected colors of mushrooms fascinated me. ... They were ancient, wild things. No two were ever alike, and they had no roots to tie them to one place; like curiosity, they wandered everywhere."
- Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose

"Every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love."
- John Muir, naturalist

"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes. By the deep sea, and music in its roars; I love not man the less, but nature more."
- George Gordon

"The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open before him and he has only to turn its leaves."
- John Burroughs

"I wandered to the well. Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught.
It tasted of the last sun before winter."
- Patricia A. McKillip, Winter Rose

"If you don't believe that the world has a heart, then you won't hear it beating, you won't think it's alive and you won't consider what you're doing to it."
- Charles de Lint, Someplace to Be Flying

"Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse."
- James Carswell

"That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds."
- Lydia M. Child

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"How unimportant we must seem to a tree."
- Morgan Llywelyn, Lion of Ireland

"It isn't easy being green."
- Kermit the Frog

"All good things are wild, and free."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature."
- Joseph Wood Krutch

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and we have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."
- William Ralph Inge, "The Idea of Progress"

"Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills."
- Voltaire

"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;
And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals, 'love' them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more."
- Edwin Way Teale

"I believe that mink are raised for being turned into fur coats and if we didn't wear fur coats those little animals would never have been born. So is it better not to have been born or to have lived for a year or two to have been turned into a fur coat? I don't know."
- Barbi Benton

"The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope
of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation."
- Henry David Thoreau

"When most people step beyond the city, what they first hear is silence. But if they listen closely, they can hear voices: Birdsong. The incessant chirp and buzz of insects. Water gurgling in a stream. A frog parliament, arguing down by a pond. Summer sounds.
It's in the winter that the silence is more profound. Sometimes it seems like all that exists is the sound of the wind. The world is dreaming, hidden under the ice and snow, waiting for spring.
Wonder and Mystery are caught in a kind of winter these days. We don't have time for them anymore; they no longer seem relevant. But their relevance can't be measured by the same yardstick that we use to measure everything else. Understanding, not what they are, but that they are, is what's important.
Remembering them now is almost a gift."
- Charles de Lint, Hedgework & Guessery

"There is no pessimism in the wild."
- Paul Winter

"Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself."
- James Anthony Froude

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, it's called sport; when the tiger wants to murder him it's called ferocity."
- George Bernard Shaw

"As a nature-lover, I enjoy seeing animals in their native wilderness habitat, provided that it is within 20 yards of plumbing and fast food."
- Dave Barry

"My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect."
- Steve Thompson, wildlife biologist at Yosemite National Park

"When a species dies, it leaves a silent space in the worldsong that can never be filled."
- Charles de Lint, Svaha

"I think as a matter of principle one should avoid eating one's friends."
- Dr. Doolittle

"Time's fun when you're having flies."
- Kermit the Frog