Sourced and curated.

If anyone wishes to observe the works of nature, he should put his trust not in books of anatomy but in his own eyes.

Galen

175

★ 1.2

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that-agent and patient at once.

Aristotle

Physics · 350 BC

★ 1.3

This benign nature so provides that over all the world you find something to imitate.

Leonardo da Vinci

1519

★ 1.3

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wilderness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1918

★ 1.8

Nature writing · Autobiography and memoir

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

Henry Beston

1928

★ 1.8

The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe.

Wallace Stegner

1983

★ 1.8

There is always something spiritual about the approach of winter. You retire into your innermost chambers and camp near the small glow you find there.

Paul Klee

★ 1.8

The world's a scene of changes, and to be Constant, in Nature were inconstancy.

Abraham Cowley

1647

★ 1.9

Biography

Autumn is quite beautiful here but all the same has a funereal air, like all beautiful autumns-something like a funereal relaxation of things.

Marcel Duchamp

★ 1.9

In disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of Scriptural passage but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. For the Holy Scripture and nature derive equally from the Godhead, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God's orders.

Galileo Galilei

1615

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir · Religious literature

All things are artificiall, for nature is the Art of God.

Sir Thomas Browne

1643

★ 1.9

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 1.9

Scripture · Religious literature

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

Proverbs 6:6-8

686 BC

★ 2.0

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 2.0

Interview

I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature.

Claude Monet

★ 2.0

Religious literature

In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary.

Maimonides

Guide for the Perplexed · 1190

★ 2.1

For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.

John Dryden

Fables Ancient and Modern · 1700

★ 2.1

Philosophical literature

Does Heaven say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced. Does Heaven say anything?

Confucius

Analects · 221 BC

★ 2.4

Novel

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice · 1813

★ 2.4

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.

Henri Poincare

Science and Method · 1908

★ 3.4

Nature writing

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

John Burroughs

1912

★ 3.5

Essay

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Aldous Huxley

1929

★ 3.5

Historical literature · Autobiography and memoir

Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

N. Scott Momaday

1967

★ 3.5

I come into the peace of wild things Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

Wendell Berry

1968

★ 3.5

All the wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God's light.

John Muir

1869

★ 3.5

It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.

Francis Kilvert

1871

★ 3.5

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.

Robert G. Ingersoll

1881

★ 3.5

Essay · Magazine · Nature writing

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

1898

★ 3.5

In nature there are few sharp lines.

A.R. Ammons

1963

★ 3.5

How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself! But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mix'd essence make A conflict of its elements, and breathe The breath of degradation and of pride.

Lord Byron

1817

★ 3.6

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends; Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home; Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends, He had the passion and the power to roam.

Lord Byron

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage · 1818

★ 3.6

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.

John Muir

1890

★ 3.6

Novel

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

D.H. Lawrence

1920

★ 3.6

Newspaper

I'm not over-fond of animals. I am merely astounded by them.

David Attenborough

1995

★ 3.6

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux

1147

★ 3.7

Treatise · Scientific literature

Whence is it that Nature does nothing in vain: and whence arises all that Order and Beauty which we see in the World?... does it not appear from Phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and throughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly.

Isaac Newton

Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light · 1704

★ 3.7

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.

William Blake

1799

★ 3.7

Novel

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Willa Cather

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 3.7

Novel · Epistolary novel

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.

Alice Walker

The Color Purple · 1982

★ 3.7

Poem · Didactic poem · Philosophical literature

A tree cannot grow in the sky, nor clouds be in the deep sea, nor fish live in the fields, nor can blood be in sticks nor sap in rocks.

Lucretius

On the Nature of Things · 55 BC

★ 3.8

Human subtlety... Will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Leonardo da Vinci

1519

★ 3.8

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 3.8

What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, & horridly cruel works of nature!

Charles Darwin

1856

★ 3.8

Philosophical literature · Religious literature

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

Yuanwu Keqin

1125

★ 3.9

Essay · Philosophical literature

Nature never makes excellent things for mean or no uses.

John Locke

An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding · 1690

★ 3.9

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.

Aristotle

Politics · 350 BC

★ 4.0

Essay

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Michel de Montaigne

Essays · 1580

★ 4.6

Nature writing · Autobiography and memoir

The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.

Henry Beston

1928

★ 5.0

Nature writing

Over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.

Thomas Cole

Essay on American Scenery · 1836

★ 5.2

Philosophical literature

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon

Novum Organum · 1620

★ 5.5

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Aristotle

350 BC

★ 5.6

Philosophical literature · Religious literature

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching · 400 BC

★ 5.8

The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning

Zbigniew Herbert

Pebble · 1966

★ 6.0

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the Lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I Love not Man the Less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage · 1818

★ 6.9

Autobiography and memoir

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence · 1974

★ 6.9