Nature is by and large to be found out-of-doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.
We all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.
Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.
The energy you use to read this sentence is powered, ultimately, by sunlight — perhaps first soaked up by some grass that got digested by a cow before it turned into the milk that made the cheese that topped the pizza. But sunlight, just the same.
And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
One should pay attention to even the smallest crawling creature, for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us, and even the smallest ant may wish to communicate with man.
Cockroaches really put my “all creatures great and small” creed to the test.
Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn’t in us. It’s almost as if we’re put here on earth to show how silly they aren’t.
The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it were conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.
What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? . . . If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest?
Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that, so it goes on flying anyway.
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.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. . . . People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Flowers . . . put up no resistance to attack, suffer evil rather than inflicting it, imitate carnal love, multiply without fighting, and die without complaining. . . . They have realized the dream of Buddha: to desire nothing, to tolerate everything, to be absorbed in oneself to the depths of the unconscious will.
Arnold Bennett visited Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw in his apartment and, knowing his host’s love of flowers, was surprised that there was not a single vase of flowers to be seen. He remarked on their absence to Shaw: “But I thought you were so fond of flowers.”
“I am,” said Shaw, “and I’m very fond of children, too, but I don’t chop their heads off and stand them in pots about the house.”
It takes a certain maturity of mind to accept that nature works as steadily in rust as in rose petals.
I am awed by the universe, puzzled by it, and sometimes angry at a natural order that brings such pain and suffering. Yet any emotion or feeling I have toward the cosmos seems to be reciprocated by neither benevolence nor hostility but just by silence. The universe appears to be a perfectly neutral screen onto which I can project any passion or attitude, and it supports them all.
