Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

All of my work is based on nature. I grew up in a rural environment and living in the Bay Area allows for immediate access to wonderful natural environs. Basically nature is my Genus Loci, or the place where my spirit resides.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

I'd like more of the world go back to being wild.

Their elegant shape, showy colours, and slow, sailing mode of flight, make them very attractive objects, and their numbers are so great that they form quite a feature in the physiognomy of the forest, compensating for the scarcity of flowers.

That Indian swamp in the wilderness…

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. They planted groves and walks of Plantanes, where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course, it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither.

I wind about, and in and out, - With here a blossom sailing, - And here and there a lusty trout, - And here and there a grayling.

The finest of the glacier meadow gardens lie ...imbedded in the upper pine forests like lakes of light.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

The Admiral says that he never beheld so fair a thing: trees all along the river, beautiful and green, and different from ours, with flowers and fruits each according to their kind, many birds and little birds which sing very sweetly.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

Nature is reminding us that it used to exist without human beings.

Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else.

The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man.

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.

Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land - health.

There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.

Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.

There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.