20 excerpts

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! ~Emily Dickinson

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. ~George Washington Carver

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. ~John Muir

If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” ~David Henry Thoreau

Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason.
~Hal Borland "The Certainty - April 5," Sundial of the Seasons (1964)

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the dull mind nature is leaden; To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History" 1841

Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
Aldo Leopold, A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds, Outdoor Life, November 1925. Reproduced in Aldo Leopold's Southwest, edited by David E. Brown & Neil B. Carmony, University of New Mexico Press, 1990, pg. 160-161.
In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."
Charles A. Lindbergh, Life, 22 December 1967

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.
Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924) Founder, Success Magazine

When one tugs at a single thing in nature; he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
John Muir

The forest is the poor man's overcoat.
New England Proverb

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.
Georgia O'Keffe

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not. .
Georgia O'Keffe

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
Pascal

To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause within our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace.
Terry Tempest Williams

Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. William Wordsworth