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:

I heard the trailing garments of the Night
Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
From the celestial walls!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Voices of the Night (1839)

Laughing at mankind is rather weary rot, I think. We shall never meet with anyone nicer. Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair. She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.

E. M. Forster Selected Letters (1983)

When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane's rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.

Norman Mailer Advertisements for Myself (1959)

God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, — which correspond to the physical element in us, — do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.

James Martineau

Because as the sun reflecting upon the wind of strands and shores is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.

Jeremy Taylor Holy Living (1650)