Quotes & Sayings About Village Nature

Elsewhere I have argued that civilizations are divided into three phases. The first phase is barbarism, a time when people believe that the laws of their own village are the laws of nature, as George Bernard Shaw put it. The second phase is civilization, where people continue to believe in the justice of their ways but harbor openness to the idea that they might be in error. The third phase, decadence, is the moment in which people come to believe that there is no truth, or that all lies are equally true. — George Friedman

What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there's no difference, no division. You aren't in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars. — Jamie Zeppa

From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. — Albert Camus

And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day. — Anton Chekhov

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics. — Isa Kamari

In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where the dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war remained. Hedges and fences were broken or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.
pp. 36-37 — Ernst Junger

Back at the cottage we explored the topography of my body; twigs in my hair, calves striped red and my skirt smudged in meadowtones. The forest underlined me, accentuated me, illustrated me. I felt alive in that midnight village whose dark places left their signatures on my skin, whose bites still hummed around my wrists. I didn't notice till then the thousand nettle stings rising like pearls; burning bracelets that my love kissed and rubbed with dock leaves; a folk remedy painting my pulse points green; honorary stalks. — Jalina Mhyana

How thin the air felt at the forest's edge, how ghostly the trees that guarded their realm ... The whole world seemed as delicate as a dandelion seed, and as fleeting ... How sad to know that the figment village of my imagination would not vanish when I ended, to understand that it was not I who had invented the moon the first time I realized how lovely it was. To admit that it was not my breath that made the winds blow ... [M]y heart, my heart knew that when I closed my eyes I invented the night sky and the stars too. Wasn't the whole dome of the sky the same shape as the inside of my skull? Didn't I create the sun and the day when I raised my eyelids every morning? — Martine Leavitt

And you know once a man has fished, or watched the thrushes hovering in flocks over the village in the bright, cool, autumn days, he can never really be a townsman, and to the day of his death he will be drawn to the country. — Anton Chekhov

But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom. — Anton Chekhov

But here Nature fulfilled her want of speech and spoke for her. The murmur of the brook, the voice of the village folk, the songs of the boatmen, the crying of the birds and rustle of trees mingled and were one with the trembling of her heart. They became one vast wave of sound which beat upon her restless soul. — Rabindranath Tagore

In one of the Welsh counties is a small village called A
. It is somewhat removed from the high road, and is, therefore, but little known to those luxurious amateurs of the picturesque, who view nature through the windows of a carriage and four. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In Devon, England, a rare ritual has been recorded wherein the stag represented the offense or misconduct (often of a sexual nature) of a local person. A mock "hunt" was enacted with characters playing the stag, dog, and hunters. This strange and noisy pageant of implication was run through the village, ending finally at the doorstep of the offender. There the stag was "killed" with all ceremony, even including the bursting of a bladder full of blood. It was thought that after such a communal condemnation, the offender would leave the village never to return — Jacqueline Simpson

People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her. — Arthur Golden

A priest is a man vowed, trained, and consecrated, a man belonging to a special corps, and necessarily with an intense esprit de corps. He has given up his life to his temple and his god. This is a very excellent thing for the internal vigour of his own priesthood, his own temple. He lives and dies for the honour of his particular god. But in the next town or village is another temple with another god. It is his constant preoccupation to keep his people from that god. Religious cults and priesthoods are sectarian by nature; they will convert, they will overcome, but they will never coalesce. — H.G.Wells

Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson ... bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, I am nature. — Ross Wetzsteon

He acts like he's in one of those Hollywood movies where after spending a couple of weeks with the natives in a remote Amazonian village, the white explorer is already debating the nature of the universe with the Chief in passable lingo. Except that in the movie, he ends up shagging the prize virgin whose body looks as if the jungle is really just a spa. What he doesn't know is that ten years down the road, she will wind up looking like all the other women in the village: saggy tits, rotten teeth, and about as supple as a mother of eight can be. — Sorin Suciu

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. — Aberjhani

These days I live in a magical little village on Dartmoor in Devon, England, and my "special spot" is a moss-covered rock in a circle of trees in the woods behind my house.
I often go into the woods, or walk through the fields and hills nearby, when I need inspiration, or to work out a plot problem, or come up with an idea. I think better on my feet, particularly when there is beautiful countryside around me and a dog at my side.
When I was younger and lived in big cities, I had special places there too. There's magic everywhere, if you look. — Terri Windling

The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature — Graham Greene

I am somewhere in the middle of a village with all the modern amenities. There's something missing. Life? I reckon.... — Manasa Rao

Wolves eat dogs." That did seem to be the consensus of the village, Arkady thought. Roman shook his head as if he'd given the matter a lot of consideration. "Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they'd all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization. — Martin Cruz Smith

Jesus is deeply connected to the earth on which he walks. He observes the forces of nature, learns from them, teaches about them, and reveals that the God of Creation is the same God who sent him to give good news to the poor, sight to the blind, and freedom to the prisoners. He walks from village to village, sometimes alone and sometimes with others; as he walks, he meets the poor, the beggars, the blind, the sick, the mourners, and those who have lost hope. He listens attentively to those with whom he walks, and he speaks to them with the authority of a true companion on the road. He remains very close to the ground. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Leave the problems of God to God and karma to karma. Today you're here and nothing you do will change that. Today you are alive and here and honored and blessed with good fortune. Look at this suset, it's beautiful, neh? This sunset exists. Tomorrow does not exist. There is only now. Please look. It is so beautiful and it will never happen ever again, never, not this sunset, never in all infinity. Lose yourself in it, make yourself one with nature and do not worry about karma, yours, mine, or that of the village. — James Clavell

Back in those days there was still an unbroken stretch of heath that lay on the route of our excursions, all that was left of a heath that once had extended almost up to the town on the one side and almost to the little village on the other. Here the honeybees and white-gray bumblebees hummed over the fragrant blossoms of heather, and the beautiful gold-green beetles ran among the plants; here in the sweet clouds of the erica and the resinous bushes hovered butterflies that could be found nowhere else on this earth. — Theodor Storm

The river of my village doesn't make you think about anything.
When you're at its bank you're only at its bank. — Alberto Caeiro

Down the steep track into the village a car was coming. A car so fantastically powerful, so superlatively beautiful that it had all the nature of an apparition. — Agatha Christie

Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and inchantments. There was not a village in England that had not a ghost in it, the church-yards were all haunted, every large common had a circle of fairies belonging to it, and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit. — Joseph Addison