Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries."
Jimmy Carter
In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature.
Giorgio Vasari
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and the most interminable, and to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter the swamp as a sacred place--a sanctum sanctorum; there is the strength, the marrow of Nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
Gary Snyder
Beauty created by Nature is equal in value to, and to be accorded reverence equal to that of the beauty of music, art or poetry of man, and experts are available to testify as to degrees of natural beauty just as they are able to testify to the quality of mortalsà art.
David Sive
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
John Muir
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom on the mountaineerÖ Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
John Muir
We of the genus Homo ride the logs that float down the Round river, and by a little judicious "burling" we have learned to guide their direction and speed. This feat entitles us to the specific appellation sapiens. The technique of burling is called economics, the remembering of old routes is called in history, the selection of new ones is called statesmanship, the conversation about oncoming rifles and rapids is called politics. Some of the crew aspire to burl not only their own blogs, but the whole flotilla as well. This collective bargaining with nature is called national planning.
Aldo Leopold
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in part, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.
Aldo Leopoldâ€
We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must resort what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
Lyndon B. Johnson
The creation of the mental domain of phantasm has a complete counterpart in the establishment of "reservations" and "nature-parks."... The "reservation" is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything make grow and spread as it pleases, including what is it useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasm is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroachment of the reality-principle.
Sigmund Freud
(Michael Astroff) says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments. Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle.
Anton Chekhovâ€
Do not feed children on a maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature. Let their souls drink in all that is pure and sweet. Rear them, if possible, amid pleasant surroundings ... Let nature teach them the lessons of good and proper living, combined with an abundance of well-balanced nourishment. Those children will grow to be the best men and women. Put the best in them by contact with the best outside. They will absorb it as a plant absorbs the sunshine and the dew.
Luther Burbank
Nature includes all of the universe and man is not only a part of nature, he is in it up to his neck
N.J. Berrill
An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
Washington Irving