Quotes & Sayings About Nature's Beauty And Life

Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.
I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.
It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. I have lived through tremendous adventures and survived only because other people risked their lives for me. Realising how interconnected and interdependent we all are, I am neither shy or embarrassed when it is time for me lean on another to ask for help. And when I have the opportunity to help another, I view it as my duty and privilege. — Yossi Ghinsberg

Every religious tradition on which we draw has a reverence for life. We are a part of an intricate web of life. Every tradition on which we draw teaches that the ultimate expression of our spirituality is our action. Deep spirituality leads to action in the world. A deep reverence for life, love of nature's complex beauty and sense of intimate connection with the cosmos leads inevitably to a commitment to work for environmental and social justice. — Peter Morales

Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them. — Alberto Caeiro

I'd rather be on the ground than under
To feel the heavy rain and the thunder. — Ana Claudia Antunes

A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'
And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful.
It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....
Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'. — Ginger Gilmour

And I sat there at the patio,
while the whole of universe,
was getting engulfed,
in the whitest whiteness of snow.

Down, near my rough paw,
is soft snow,
mannering a fidgeting embryo.

I monitored the snow that plunged,
on the soil of my backyard,
and realized it melting fast.
Was that the temperature or,
my eyes on it overcast?

While I think of this melted exalt,
I am obliged to ask,
What ought happens to the thoughts?
Where do they get tossed?
When they are forgot?

Scorched?
Scoffed?
Deformed?
Unadorned? — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life's deep, coursing threads ... Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear. — Barry Lopez

If I could take a bite of the whole world
And feel it on my palate
I'd be more happy for a minute or so...
But I don't always want to be happy.
Sometimes you have to be
Unhappy to be natural...

Not every day is sunny.
When there's been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.
So I take unhappiness with happiness
Naturally, like someone who doesn't find it strange
That there are mountains and plains
And that there are cliffs and grass...

What you need is to be natural and calm
In happiness and in unhappiness,
To feel like someone seeing,
To think like someone walking,
And when it's time to die, remember the day dies,
And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful...
That's how it is and that's how it should be... — Alberto Caeiro

Emulate nature; see! A flower creates it's beauty with openness, kindness, slowness and with harmony. — Debasish Mridha

Beauty combined with wantonness frequently ends in the drawn twitch, fixed eye and helpless limbs of life-in-death. It is Nature's revenge on the outraged body, - and do you know, Eternity's revenge on the impure Soul is extremely similar? — Marie Corelli

Alas ! How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with their beauty ! The cares, and sorrows, and the hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear. It is a common thing for the countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth. — Charles Dickens

I promise you that the same stuff galaxies are made of, you are. The same energy that swings planets around stars makes electrons dance in your heart. It is in you, outside you, you are it. It is beautiful. Trust in this. And you your life will be grand. — Kamal Ravikant

It is important to fund young researchers who want to do curiosity-driven research. Curiosity-driven research is a part of life. Some people are curious. They want to learn more about nature and society should help that. It's like art: you can learn more and bring more beauty. — Serge Haroche

A fit queen for that nest of roses was the human flower that adorned it, for a year of love and luxury had ripened her youthful beauty into a perfect bloom. Graceful by nature, art had little to do for her, and, with a woman's aptitude, she had acquired the polish which society alone can give. Frank and artless as ever, yet less free in speech, less demonstrative in act; full of power and passion, yet still half unconscious of her gifts; beautiful with the beauty that wins the heart as well as satisfies the eye, yet unmarred by vanity or affectation. She now showed fair promise of becoming all that a deep and tender heart, an ardent soul and a gracious nature could make her, once life had tamed and taught her more. — Louisa May Alcott

Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice. — James Ellis

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can't look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can't find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with. — Wallace Stegner

The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass, they speak to me. The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me. The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning, the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me. The strength of the fire, the taste of the salmon, the trail of the sun, and the life that never goes away, they speak to me. And my heart soars. — Chief Dan George

Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray, where nature heals and give strength to body and soul alike. — John Muir

Miss Bates ... had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal goodwill and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness and quick-sighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body and a mine of felicity to herself. — Jane Austen

I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have. — Jennifer Ryan

Who can pray this request and mean it? Only he who looks at the whole of life from this point of view. Such a man will not fall into the trap of superspirituality, so concentrating on God's redemption as to disregard his creation; people like that, however devoted and well-meaning, are unearthly in more senses than one, and injure their own humanity. Instead, he will see everything as stemming ultimately from the Creator's hand, and therefore as fundamentally good and fascinating, whatever man may have made of it (beauty, sex, nature, children, arts, crafts, food, games, no less than theology and church things). Then in thankfulness and joy he will so live as to help others see life's values, and praise God for them, as he does. Supremely in this drab age, hallowing God's name starts here, with an attitude of gratitude for the goodness of the creation. — J.I. Packer

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life. — George Santayana

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

You act as if I were your enemy.
"You are my enemy. You seek to end the things I love."
And is an ending always bad? it asked. Must not all things, even worlds, someday end?
"There is no need to hasten that end," Vin said. "No reason to force it."
All things are subject to their own nature, Vin, Ruin said, seeming to flow around her. She could feel its touch on her - wet and delicate, like mist. You cannot blame me for what I am. Without me, nothing would end. Nothing could end. And therefore, nothing could grow. I am life. Would you fight life itself?
Vin fell silent.
Do not mourn because the day of this world's end has arrived, Ruin said. That end was ordained the very day of the world's conception. There is a beauty in death - the beauty of finality, the beauty of completion.
For nothing is truly complete until the day it is finally destroyed. — Brandon Sanderson

Also at times, on the surface of streams,
Water?bubbles form
And grow and burst
And have no meaning at all
Except that they're water?bubbles
Growing and bursting. — Alberto Caeiro

Happiness is in nature, beauty, and tranquility. — Debasish Mridha

I'm a keeper of flocks.
The flock is my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and with my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

Thinking about a flower is seeing and smelling it
And eating a piece of fruit is knowing its meaning.

That's why when on a hot day
I feel sad from liking it so much,
And I throw myself lengthwise on the grass
And shut my hot eyes,
And feeling my whole body lying on reality,
I know the truth and I'm happy. — Alberto Caeiro

When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps. — John Lennon

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be ... gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier ... it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book ... — Gene Stratton-Porter

Divinity means unfolding and expressing life in new ways. Divinity means radiating peace, bliss and beauty in the world. Divinity means overcoming the limitations of nature in new ways. — Amit Ray

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

Life is always more beautiful and worth living when you are capable of enjoying the beauty of nature — Munia Khan

Pico Iyer: And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps. — Krista Tippett

Even when I see a beautiful woman, I think, 'Aw, her life must be amazing.' Everyone does it. That's human nature to believe that beauty is everything. — Marina And The Diamonds

Marian's eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. Now you see? You wondered what was in whale's milk. Don't you know now? The same thing that's in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn't good life and bad life, there's only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born! — Wallace Stegner

To the Finnish, being outdoors in nature isn't about paying homage to nature or to ourselves, the way it tends to be for Americans. We fetishize are life lists, catalog peaks bagged and capture pristine scenes of grand wilderness It is largely an individual experience. For the Finnish, though, nature is about expressing a close-knit identity. Nature is where they can exult in their nationalistic obsessions of berry-picking, mushrooming, fishing, lake swimming and Nordic skiing. — Florence Williams

For me the number one reason is that us people with autism love the greenness of nature.
... Our fondness for nature is, I think, a little bit different to everyone else's. I'm guessing that what touches you in nature is the beauty of the trees and the flowers and things. But to us people with special needs, nature is as important as our own lives. The reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged. However often, we're ignored and pushed away by other people, nature will always give us a good big hug, here inside our hearts.
The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that's the reason we love to go for walks. — Naoki Higashida

The best remedy for those who are frightened, lovely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity. — Anne Frank

And since today's all there is for now, that's everything.
Who knows if I'll be dead the day after tomorrow?
If I'm dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrow
Will be another thunderstorm than if I hadn't died.
Of course I know thunderstorms don't fall because I see them,
But if I weren't in the world,
The world would be different -
There would be me the less -
And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.
No matter what happens, what's falling is what'll be falling when it falls.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

Art is life seen through man's inner craving for perfection and beauty
his escape from the sordid realities of life into a world of his imagining. Art accounts for at least a third of our civilization,
and it is one of the artist's principal duties to do more than merely record life or nature.
To the artist is given the privilege of pointing the way and inspiring towards a better life. — Paul Outerbridge

The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life. — Rabindranath Tagore

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

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate) — Mary Oliver

The philosophical study of beauty, art, and the splendor of nature nurtures a person's fertile mind by exposing a person to the puzzling world of the beautiful, elegant, ugly, and grotesque. Human beings ability to experience sublime pleasure emanates from a variety of sensory experiences and a person's ability to make discriminatory observations and judgment in taste and sentiment. — Kilroy J. Oldster

In the blackness of the midnight sleep world, immunized from the harsh glare of daytime reality, the active imagination of the soul dances in the mind of a dream weaver. Safely shrouded in the all-encompassing blanket of darkness supplied by nighttime sleep, our secret wishes speak to us by channeling the collective mythology of the primordial mind. During the wee hours of night, right before first light, we summon our personal muse to tell us in operatic fashion what it means to be human. If we listen carefully, our muse's heart songs shares with us what it means to experience both the tragedy and comedy of life, and encourages us to unreservedly embrace in a moral manner the banality, brutality, beauty, and splendor of nature that occurs eternally in the cosmic world that swaddles us. — Kilroy J. Oldster

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here

Did I just now hear a beautiful symphony over here ?
Or is it just your soothing words murmuring in my ear?

Is it the cute mynah bird on my shoulder?
Or is it your soft head nestling that I feel so tender?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here...

Did I just now hear the nightingale sing around here?
Or is it the breeze whispering softly to the trees near?

Is that you giggling away to glory?
Or is that just the flowers mingling with the bees and telling their story?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here.. — Avijeet Das

The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men. — Joseph Conrad

If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon
you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks. — Michael Crichton

The secret of a happy life is to live a life with child-like simplicity, appreciate nature's beauty, and admire honesty. — Debasish Mridha

It's hard to explain, but it's related to me know that for every moment of beauty this place gives me, I probably miss a thousand more. And I want them all. I swear I'd live on the dunes if I could. I was born out of my time. I should have been around during the end of the eighteenth century, when the Romantic Era kicked off, and writers and artists were obsessed with nature: the ocean, the mountains, the sky. And they believed in following their own path, experimenting, not blindly obeying rules.
I found a quote by Henry David Thoreau- "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" ... It made me cry. Urgency is so beautiful. — Kirsty Eagar

Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist's way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that's one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature. — Jonas Salk

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his power of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection. — Charles Darwin

There's something beautiful about keeping certain aspects of your life hidden. Maybe people and clouds are beautiful because you can't see everything. — Kamenashi Kazuya

It is difficult to estimate the influence upon a life of the early formed habit of doing everything to a finish, not leaving it half done, or pretty nearly done, but completely done. Nature completes every little leaf, even every little rib, its edges and stera, as exactly and perfectly as though it were the only leaf to be made that year. Even the flower that blooms in the mountain dell, where no human eye will ever behold it, is made with the same perfection and exactness of form and outline, with the same delicate shade of color, with the same completeness of beauty, as though it were intended for royalty in the queen's garden. "Perfection to the finish," is — Orison Swett Marden

I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. — Yossi Ghinsberg

If only humans could die like the autumn leaves, with a splash of beauty and the promise of another season. — Shana Chartier

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature ... yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing. — Muriel Barbery

Maple leaves in autumn do not suddenly transform into stained glass pendants ... in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty. Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree. But the tree survives, WHILE our vision is ravished. The peacock's display attracts a hen, AND it nourishes the human eye. The flower's fragrance entices a pollinator, BUT IT ALSO intoxicates the gardener. In that "while," in that "and," in that "but it also," we find the giftedness of life. — Terryl L. Givens

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

I who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mystery of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise, and to come unto me, for I am the soul of nature, that gives life to the universe, from me all things proceed, and unto me all things must return, but for those who would seek to worship me, let them do so with joy in their hearts for all acts of love and of pleasure are my rituals, let them develop within them the qualities of compassion, kindness, humility, love, understanding. But for those who seek to know me, let them know that if all they are seeking and they are yearning it will avail them not until they learn the great mystery that which you seek you find not within yourself you'll never find it without. For I am that which is attained at the end of all suffering. I am she of a thousand names. — The Empress

First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life! — Irving Stone

Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. — Brett McKay

The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection ... the dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. — Okakura Kakuzo

O, if so much beauty doth reveal
Itself in every vein of life and nature,
How beautiful must be the Source itself,
The Ever Bright One. — Esaias Tegner

One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles? — Mark Doty

If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,
And Spring came the day after tomorrow,
I would die peacefully, because it came the day after tomorrow.
If that's its time, when else should it come?
I like it that everything is real and everything is right;
And I like that it would be like this even if I didn't like it.
And so, if I die now, I die peacefully
Because everything is real and everything is right. — Alberto Caeiro

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one's life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie ... Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics ... — Barry Lopez

Magnificent beauty of nature inviting you to long for her, to love her, and then purify your heart and mind with the illuminating beauty of nature. — Debasish Mridha

It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise. — Charles Baudelaire

Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace. — Terri Windling

Life is infinite energy coupled with limitless creative imagination. It is the invisible essence and substance of every visible form. Its nature is goodness, truth, wisdom and beauty, as well as energy and imagination. Our highest satisfaction comes from a sense of conscious union with this invisible Life. All human endeavor is an attempt to get back to first principles, to find such an inward wholeness that all sense of fear, doubt and uncertainty vanishes. — Ernest Holmes

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

As soon as he had left the room and walked into the air, he knew that he would never return and for the first time his fears lifted. It was a spring morning, and when he walked into Severndale Park he felt the breeze bringing back memories of a much earlier life, and he was at peace. He sat beneath a tree and looked up at its leaves in amazement - where once he might have gazed at them and sensed there only the confusion of his own thoughts, now each leaf was so clear and distinct that he could see the lightly coloured veins which carried moisture and life. And he looked down at his own hand, which seemed translucent beside the bright grass. His head no longer ached, and as he lay upon the earth he could feel its warmth beneath him. — Peter Ackroyd

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, "Are you at peace with yourself?" and he answered, "No, I'm at peace." It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one. — Alvaro De Campos

Between the dark, heavily laden treetops of the spreading chestnut trees could be seen the dark blue of the sky, full of stars, all solemn and golden, which extended their radiance unconcernedly into the distance. That was the nature of the stars. and the trees bore their buds and blossoms and scars for everyone to see, and whether it signified pleasure or pain, they accepted the strong will to live. flies that lived only for a day swarmed toward their death. every life had its radiance and beauty. i had insight into it all for a moment, understood it and found it good, and also found my life and sorrows good. — Hermann Hesse

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it. — Lynn Weingarten

Be a person who sees endless beauty in nature and in humanity. — Debasish Mridha

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. — Rene Dubos

It wasn't only you, Lord Langford. It was this place, these people. This life. I want nothing to do with it."
"It's a bit late for that, Rue. Whether you like it or not, we are your blood."
"Half my blood."
"Aye," agreed the marquess, sober. "Although 'twould seem you've gotten the better half by far. All beauty, none of the beast."
She blinked at that, and crossed her arms.
"How charming! Had you planned that for long?"
"Only since this morning." He shrugged, unabashed. "I'll do better in London."
"Please, don't bother."
"I'm afraid I can't help myself. I'm charming by nature." And he looked back at her now in utter and wicked innocence, snaring her in a world of sharp, splendid green.
-Rue & Kit — Shana Abe

I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form. — Pierce Brown

Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation) — Wendell Berry

My inspiration's coming from nature, I love nature and all the expressions, I love art, I love expressions of beauty. It's part of my life, being engaged in the moment. — Rickson Gracie

Our hearts and minds desire clarity. We like to have a clear picture of a situation, a clear view of how things fit together, and clear insight into our own and the world's problems. But just as in nature colors and shapes mingle without clear-cut distinctions, human life doesn't offer the clarity we are looking for. The borders between love and hate, evil and good, beauty and ugliness, heroism and cowardice, care and neglect, guilt and blamelessness are mostly vague, ambiguous, and hard to discern. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? - Love's Labor Lost. The eyes appears to be more immediately connected with the soul than any other organ. A woman reflects every emotion, almost every thought from her two wonderful, priceless eyes, and no feature of her face is more a telltale of her nature. "Show me," says the old Chinese proverb, "a man's eyes, and I will tell you what he might have been. Show me his mouth, and I will tell you what he has been." The same is true of women. Up to thirty or thirty-five a woman may be actress enough to make her eyes tell one tale, while her life would reveal another; but little by little the true state of a woman's soul stands forth in the expression, the frankness, the furtiveness, the candor, or the boldness — Harriet Hubbard Ayer

One day, the lotus spoke again. "You remember me? The flower that grows through the mud?" I did. I said as much. "Have you ever considered my significance? I'm everywhere - art, religion, nature.... Have you ever wondered why?"

... It spoke, "Nothing touches me. I radiate beauty. You can do the same."

"How?" I asked.

"Easy," it said. "I grow in a pond. I take the water and nutrients I need to grow, and let the rest sink to the bottom. What's in mud, anyway? Water, nutrients, life and a little bit of sludge. Let the sludge go like I do. Then stand tall above the leaves. — Dawn Casey-Rowe

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind's sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature's plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic. — Kilroy J. Oldster

God is the most beautiful, and beauty is the expression of God. If you can't appreciate beauty in the world how can you understand God? — Amit Ray

Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. Drinking water when you're thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when you're tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations don't need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational.' — Barry Long

Tarkovsky was right. The responsibility of the artist is to stir people's hearts and minds toward loving others: to find the light and the true beauty of human nature within this love. Religion can rarely show us what fate means in concrete terms. Yet everyone needs to be understood and this understanding is found within each individual's fate, one's life journey that clarifies the way. I'm not a therapist or a philosopher or a priest. I'm an artist. — Qiu Miaojin

There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that's wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature - not romance - dictate this. It occurs to me that sometimes even nature - raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature - fears, even if only slightly, rot. — Rick Bass

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children. — Extract From Chief Seattle.

I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..
Never to the defect of demanding of the World
That it be anything that's not the World. — Alberto Caeiro

I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence
I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides. — Neil Peart

Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality. — Thomas Moore

I cling to the beauty and strength of nature and all wild creatures with a passion born of certainty that only through them can i retain my perspective about life and my own part in it. — Virginia McKenna

I began to feel that nature itself was nurturing me, reminding me that life still offered beauty and calm, and that I was also made out of these elements. — Elizabeth Berrien

A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493 — Ivan Goncharov

Aesthetic and moral education are closely related to this sensory education. Multiply the sensations, and develop the capacity of appreciating fine differences in stimuli and we refine the sensibility and multiply man's pleasures. Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The aesthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coarse senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of aesthetic enjoyment, before which men pass as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them. Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross. — Montessori Maria