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.

Random quote on Nature

Most quoted on nature:

We hear the wail of the remorseful winds
In their strange penance. And this wretched orb
Knows not the taste of rest; a maniac world,
Homeless and sobbing through the deep she goes.

Alexander Smith

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Indian Serenade (1819)

All Nature wears one universal grin.

Henry Fielding Tom Thumb the Great (1730)

The old
Old winds that blew
When chaos was, what do
They tell the clattered trees that I
Should weep?

Adelaide Crapsey Verses (1915)

Quiet night that brings
Rest to the labourer, is the outlaw's day,
In which he rises early to do wrong,
And when his work is ended, dares not sleep.

Philip Massinger The Guardian (1633)