Nature Quotes
The page runs from Shakespeare and Milton through Longfellow, Wordsworth and Thomas Moore, so most of it is poetry from before 1900. Two of the best-sourced lines are in prose. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605), uses the sun passing through pollutions and remaining as pure as before. Einstein, in an essay for Leo Baeck (1953), says joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.
Three entries are flagged misattributed: a couplet about old Hoghton and pale moonlight credited to William Hazlitt, a remark that kites rise against, not with, the wind, credited to Lewis Mumford, and “You can’t just let nature run wild,” credited to Walt Disney.
I must become a borrower of the night
For a dark hour or twain.
Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,
Like footsteps upon wool.
There swift return
Diurnal, merely to officiate light
Round this opacous earth, this punctual spot.
Light taking forever to get here,
more precious when it arrives.
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The Answer is blown' in the wind.
The course of Nature seems a course of Death,
And nothingness the whole substantial thing.
He’d heard it said: Nature was the original and greatest sorcerer or sorceress of all.
No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature.
Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise.
And recognizes ever and anon
The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul.
Behold him setting in his western skies,
The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise.
When the sun sets, shadows, that showed at noon
But small, appear most long and terrible.
As sunshine, broken in the rill,
Though turn'd astray, is sunshine still!