Quotes · Skopia

43 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Man and nature✕clear

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

1807

★ 7.2

Personal journal

Come out of your warm, angular house, resounding with few voices, into the chill, grand, instantaneous night, with such a Presence as a full moon in the clouds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1838

★ 6.9

Scripture · Religious literature

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis 1:28

1405 BC

★ 6.2

Philosophical literature

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Novum Organum · 1620

★ 5.5

Essay · Magazine

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Henry David Thoreau

Life Without Principle · 1862

★ 5.3

Novella · Autobiography and memoir

I am haunted by waters.

A River Runs Through It · 1976

★ 5.3

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

George Perkins Marsh

Man and Nature · 1864

★ 5.2

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Buckminster Fuller

1969

★ 5.2

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

1972

★ 5.2

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.

1928

★ 5.0

Essay · Nature writing

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

A Sand County Almanac · 1949

★ 4.4

Autobiography and memoir

We can never have enough of nature…. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden · 1854

★ 3.9

You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will hurry back.

20 BC

★ 3.8

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

All that is in harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 3.8

Drunk we lie down in empty hills, heaven and earth our quilt and pillow.

762

★ 3.8

Personal journal

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

Epigram · Philosophical literature

Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

Pensees · 1662

★ 3.8

Personal journal

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1843

★ 3.8

Film · Action (film) · Crime (film) · Action · Crime

Just feel what the wave is doing. Then accept its energy. Get in sync and charge with it. You don't need to see.

Point Break · 1991

★ 3.8

Scripture · Religious literature

Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees.

Revelation 7:3 · 90

★ 3.7

Personal journal

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Henry David Thoreau

1853

★ 3.7

He that plants trees loves others beside himself.

Thomas Fuller (physician)

1732

★ 3.6

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.

1817

★ 3.6

Personal journal

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

1890

★ 3.6

Autobiography and memoir · Religious literature

There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

Sir Thomas Browne

1643

★ 3.5

Personal journal

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

Personal journal

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains—mountain-dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

1890

★ 3.5

We have met the enemy and he is us.

1970

★ 3.5

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

Lawrence Durrell

1957

★ 3.5

These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Wallace Stegner

1960

★ 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.

1968

★ 3.5

Interview · Newspaper

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Buckminster Fuller

1978

★ 3.5

Philosophical literature

The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of Man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgement. The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

1936

★ 3.4

Epigram · Philosophical literature

For after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in respect of that which is infinite, an all in respect of nothing, a middle betwixt nothing and all.

Pensees · 1662

★ 2.1

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

★ 2.0

There is no land unhabitable nor sea innavigable.

1589

★ 1.9

Speech · Political speech

The forest has fallen by the ax of our woodsmen; the soil has been made to teem by the tillage of our farmers; our commerce has whitened every ocean. The dominion of man over physical nature has been extended by the invention of our artists.

John Quincy Adams

Inaugural Address of John Quincy Adams · 1825

★ 1.9

Novel · Satire

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure-wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

Main Street · 1920

★ 1.9

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

Gravity's Rainbow · 1973

★ 1.9

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

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