Quotes & Sayings About Breathing In Nature

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning, - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature's awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man. — David William Parry

The naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote or abstruse; it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. — C.S. Lewis

You are not an accident. Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did ... Long before you were conceived by your parents, you were conceived in the mind of God. He thought of you first. It is not fate, nor chance, nor luck, nor coincidence that you are breathing this very moment. You are alive because God wanted to create you! — Rick Warren

In more simple words, we might say everything in the universe is trying to become every other thing; and every condition of everything is trying to become every other condition. A hot iron, for example, will strive to become as cool as its environment, and the cool environment will strive to become as hot as the hot iron. They compromise and find an equilibrium between the two, which is neither the one thing nor the other. This conspicuous fact is one of the most characteristic traits of Nature. — Walter Russell

There is a mystical quality to the place where sea meets land, the clashing of two very different worlds. Yet continuity remains between them. The oceans reclaim the earth with their wind and water. The earth soaks up the sea to be carried off by the rain. They are always in flux. Each has their specific creatures, breathing in their own given ways, but dying in the same way, caught in a constant battle to survive. They swim and run and fly in tranquil spaces, among rolling hills and waves, great blue and green expanses, mountains both below the surface and above. And there is violence in their worlds. — F.G. Capitanio

The moon can never breathe, but it can take our breath away with the beauty of its cold, arid orb. — Munia Khan

It must not be supposed that atoms of every sort can be linked in every variety of combination. If that were so, you would see monsters coming into being everywhere. Hybrid growths of man and beast would arise. Lofty branches would spread here and there from a living body. Limbs of land-beast and sea-beast would often be conjoined. Chimeras breathing flame from hideous jaws would be reared by nature throughout the all-generating earth. — Titus Lucretius Carus

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough. — Ray Bradbury

She tilted her head back, breathing deeply. It was a stone gray day, the sea a bleak slate broken up by whitecaps, the sky pleated with thick ripples of cloud. A hard wind filled the sails, carrying the little boat over the waves.
'It feels good to be this kind of cold,' she murmured.
'This kind?'
'Wind in your hair, sea spray on your skin. The cold of the living. — Leigh Bardugo

Birth and Death are words we chose to describe the doorways in and out of a cycle. This cycle is connected to a larger cycle which awaits our return. It is all just like breathing. Remove the fear and judgement to recognize the same pattern as a principle everywhere. — Franklin Gillette

All nature ... is a respiration Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter Will inhale it into his bosom again, So that nothing but God alone will remain. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire. — Thomas Carlyle

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention. — Donald Miller

The nature of poems
Is a matter of words and deeds
An intimate encounter of voice
In the ache of the heart
In the labor of breathing
A hesitant casting of eyes
Away from the mundane to see
That delicate and shiny thing
In the oddly prosaic rock pile
An extravagance of conceit
An abundance of grace
A prayer for words to speak — Kendall Dana Lockerman

Tyrion felt the heat rise in him. "It was not my dagger," he insisted. "How many times must I swear to that? Lady Stark, whatever you may believe of me, I am not a stupid man. Only a fool would arm a common footpad with his own blade."
Just for a moment, he thought he saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes, but what she said was, "Why would Petyr lie to me?"
"Why does a bear shit in the woods?" he demanded. "Because it is his nature. Lying comes as easily as breathing to a man like Littlefinger. You ought to know that, you of all people. — George R R Martin

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens ... air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely. — Richard Nelson

Buddha taught, "Breathing in, I recognize my feeling. Breathing out, I calm my feeling." If you practice this, not only will your feeling be calmed down but the energy of mindfulness will also help you see into the nature and roots of your anger. Mindfulness helps you be concentrated and look deeply. This is true meditation. The insight will come after some time of practice. You will see the truth about yourself and the truth about the person who you thought to be the cause of your suffering. This insight will release you from your anger and transform the roots of anger in you. The transformation in you will also help transform the other person. Mindful speaking can bring real happiness, and unmindful speech can kill. When someone tells us something that makes us happy, that is a wonderful gift. But sometimes someone says something to us that is so cruel and distressing that we feel like committing suicide. We lose our joie de vivre. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom ... It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. — Zora Neale Hurston

In nature, we find so may things. At the water's edge, atop a mountain, or in the middle of a park, I watch my children flourish in who they are. With all the distractions, toys, and walls out of the way, the essence of who they are just shines. When I remember to pay attention, I see it radiating so strongly that I can't help but be brought right into it myself. My children are experts on breathing, on living; they know how to do it. And the open air? Why, that's breath itself. When I find myself in the midst of unsettling chaos-full of more commitments and expectations that we can really handle-I need to look no further than my little ones for the answer to what I've forgotten: Stop. Breathe. Listen. Then we head straight to the beach, or right to the woods, and play until we find ourselves restored. — Amanda Blake Soule

Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. — Robert Aris Willmott

This time I am a force.
A deviation of human nature.
I am living, breathing proof that nature is officially screwed, afraid of what it's done, what it's become.
And I'm stronger. I'm angrier.
I'm ready to do something I'll definitely regret and this time I don't care. I'm done being nice. I'm done being nervous. I'm not afraid of anything anymore.
Mass chaos is in my future.
And I'm leaving my gloves behind. — Tahereh Mafi

Meanwhile, the Mosteks spent a frantic hour trying to comprehend the dire nature of Rece's situation. Then Dr. Sammut entered the waiting room and gave the worried parents a thumbs-up. Inside a plastic vial was the unbelievable item that had nearly taken Rece's life: a popcorn kernel that had been lodged in his left lung. Rece's condition was the result of a perfect storm. Months earlier, he had inhaled a kernel of popcorn, which became lodged in his right lung. This led to infections and breathing problems, including pneumonia. But his excessive coughing earlier that day had thrust the kernel from the right lung and propelled it into his left lung, where it unluckily blocked his airway. — Anonymous

Conscious breathing is the best antidote to stress, anxiety and depression. — Amit Ray

What we should understand here is that it's not food or breathing that life ultimately needs, but energy. And the most direct expression of energy is heat. In this sense, temperature expresses the essence of life. When you feel the heat in your body, you're observing the most central operations of your life. You're connected to the essence of life. — Ilchi Lee

We live by faith; but Faith is not the slave Of text and legend. Reason's voice and God's, Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds. What asks our Father of His children, save Justice and mercy and humility, A reasonable service of good deeds, Pure living, tenderness to human needs, Reverence and trust, and prayer for light to see The Master's footprints in our daily ways? No knotted scourge nor sacrificial knife, But the calm beauty of an ordered life Whose very breathing is unworded praise! - A life that stands as all true lives have stood Firm-rooted in the faith that God is Good. — John Greenleaf Whittier

In the book of Job, the Lord demands, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

"I was there!"-surely that is the answer to God's question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the 'snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks" of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe. — Peter Matthiessen

An excess of development can undermine the most ephemeral but distinctive tool a writer possesses: authorial voice. A writer's voice is as individual and marked as a thumbprint, and is a playwright's truest imprimatur. It is as innate as breathing, and can be as unique as any genetic code. By its very singular nature, it is seldom born in the act of collaboration. True authorial voice always pre-dates the first rehearsal of a text. And it is - and will always be - an author's most distinguishing and valuable feature. — David Wright

In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.
What kind of idiot came up with that rule? The didn't understand human nature at all.
She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two different entities with seperate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn't realise that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest. — Sharon Guskin

Why does a bear shit in the woods?" he demanded. "Because it is his nature. Lying comes as easily as breathing to a man — George R R Martin

What happens with your stream of experience if you realize that no one is in control of it? If you see that it is just going along of itself, unpushed and unpulled? (This is what the Chinese writing on this page means: The Tao, the course of nature, flows of itself.) You can get the feel of it by breathing without doing anything to help your breath along. Let the breath out, and then let it come back by itself, when it feels like it. And then out again when it wants to go out. — Alan W. Watts

How can a deer tell when a leaf falls silent in the forest? She hears it breathing differently. — Richard Bach

I walk in Nature's way until I shall lie down and rest, breathing my last in this from which I draw my daily breath, and lying down on this from which my father drew his vital seed, my mother her blood, my nurse her milk; from which for so many years I am fed and watered day by day; which bears my footstep and my misusing it for so many purposes. — Marcus Aurelius

Yes," some objectors declare, "I would like to expand my consciousness, but I feel that I must do it for myself."
To this, our usual reply is that doing everything for oneself can be an unbearably limiting factor as well as an exercise in egotism. What if we had to weave all our own clothes, grow our own food, make our own paper and so forth? In actuality we accomplish hardly anything without external instruments, tools or technological aids. Our manifest interdependence attests to nature's determination to force us to overcome isolationist tendencies. Even our two most essential physiological functions, eating and breathing, serve as constant reminders that in every respect we are obliged to use what lies outside of the confines of the bodily organism.
In the end, we do nothing alone and everything by our selves. — Marcia Moore

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,
And I look at flowers and I smile...
I don't know if they understand me
Or if I understand them,
But I know the truth is in them and in me
And in our common divinity
Of letting ourselves go and live on the Earth
And carrying us in our arms through the contented Seasons
And letting the wind sing us to sleep
And not have dreams in our sleep. — Alberto Caeiro

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.
I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.
They're things known from the outside.
But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head. — Alberto Caeiro

True communion with nature becomes possible when the energy sense is turned on and heightened. You're moved by the sounds of a bird singing in the morning, and you can feel the principles of nature even in a single leaf falling with its back to the setting sun. You come to realize that you were never alone, that you have always been breathing surrounded by the massive energy of life. — Ilchi Lee

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I've conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room. — Barry Lopez

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys. — David Abram

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. — Tom Robbins

Your anger is like a flower. In the beginning you may not understand the nature of your anger, or why it has come up. But if you know how to embrace it with the energy of mindfulness, it will begin to open. You may be sitting, following your breathing, or you may be practicing walking meditation to generate the energy of mindfulness and embrace your anger. After ten or twenty minutes your anger will have to open herself to you, and suddenly, you will see the true nature of your anger. It may have arisen just because of a wrong perception or the lack of skillfulness. — Nhat Hanh

Bring your attention to your breathing and realize that you are not doing it. It is the breath of nature. You reconnect with nature in the most intimate and powerful way by becoming aware of your breathing and learning to hold your attention there.
This is a healing and deeply empowering thing to do. It brings about a shift in consciousness from the conceptual world of thought to the inner realm of unconditioned consciousness. — Eckhart Tolle

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun. — William Shakespeare

Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils? — Ian Fleming

The snow has not yet left the earth, but spring is already asking to enter your heart. If you have ever recovered from a serious illness, you will be familiar with the blessed state when you are in a delicious state of anticipation, and are liable to smile without any obvious reason. Evidently that is what nature is experiencing just now. The ground is cold, mud and snow squelches under foot, but how cheerful, gentle and inviting everything is! The air is so clear and transparent that if you were to climb to the top of the pigeon loft or the bell tower, you feel you might actually see the whole universe from end to end. The sun is shining brightly, and its playful, beaming rays are bathing in the puddles along with the sparrows. The river is swelling and darkening; it has already woken up and very soon will begin to roar. The trees are bare, but they are already living and breathing. — Anton Chekhov

Not just beautiful, though
the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me. — Haruki Murakami