As distant prospects please us, but when near
We find but desert rocks and fleeting air.
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.
Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.
It is as though night set free the soul and taught its independence of physical organization.
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.