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.
Nature has no more esteem
or care for the seed of man
than for the ant
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
Let others hail the rising sun:
I bow to that whose course is run.
But on and up, where Nature’s heart
Beats strong amid the hills.
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
Nature too unkind;
That made no medicine for a troubled mind!