“The god-given is called Nature; to follow that nature is called Tao; to cultivate the Tao is called Culture.”
“He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.”
“Do not let finely meshed nets be cast in ponds and lakes and the fish and turtles will be more than can be consumed; let axes enter the mountain groves only at the appropriate time and the timber will be more than can be used.”
“We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
“This fear, this night of the mind must be dispelled, not by the rays of the sun, but by the face of nature and her laws.”
“Why do I live among the green mountains?
I laugh and answer not, my soul is serene;
It dwells in another heaven and earth belonging to no man.
The peach trees are in flower and the water flow on.”
“The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. The earth should not be injured! The earth must not be destroyed!”
“All of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.”
“Glance at the sun. See the moon and stars. Gaze at the beauty of the green earth. Now think.”
“Nature is the highest good and the highest excellence lies in accepting the laws of Nature completely.”
“Does a dog have Buddha Nature? This is the most serious question of all because if you say either yes or no, you lose your own Buddha-nature.”
“Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.”
“Hundreds of flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
A cool breeze in summer, and snow in winder;
If there is no vain cloud in your mind,
For you it is a good season.”
“At this time, because earth, grasses and trees, fences and walls, tiles and pebbles, all things in the dharma realm in the universe in ten directions carry out buddha-work, therefore everyone receives the benefit of wind and water movement caused by this functioning, and all are imperceptibly helped by the wondrous and incomprehensible influence of buddha to actualize the enlightenment at hand.”
“Amazed at the heights of mountains, the ocean’s wideness, the power of nature, and the distance of stars; ourselves we consider not.”
“To understand the essence, listen to the call of frogs, the billowing wind, the falling rain, all speaking the wonderful language of the essential Nature.”
“Man is a microcosm, a little world, because his is an extract from all the stars and planets, from the earth and the elements, and so he is their quintessence.”
“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”
“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”
“Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs, -
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music.”
“Nature is eternally young, beautiful and generous. It pours poetry and beauty into all beings and plants, which are allowed to develop as they wish. It has the secret of happiness, and no one has been able to take it away from it.”
“Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature and through her, God.”
“Summer is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”
“Deer-stalking would be a very fine sport if only the deer had guns.”
“Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all - my head is bursting.. ..I want to fight, scratch it off, start again, because I start to see and understand. I seems to me as if I can see nature and I can catch it all...”
“I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities.”
“What you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter… Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me, He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in?”
“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”
“In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.”
“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country as the water is the sea... the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”
“Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
“Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.”
“Nothing could persuade me that 'in the image of God' applied only to man. In fact, it seemed to me that the high mountains the rivers, lakes, trees flowers, and animals far better exemplified the essence of God than men with their ridiculous clothes, their meanness, vanity, mendacity, and abhorrent egotism”
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
“Forests require many years to mature; consequently the long point of view is necessary if the forests are to be maintained for the good of our country.”
“The forests are the "lungs" of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. Truly, they make the country more livable.”
“I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the back of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out… I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life… and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled… It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late… That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”
“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”
“'Nature' is a term that may lend itself to any ethic and any theology; it fits the science of Darwin and the unmorality of Nietzsche more snugly than the sweet reasonableness of Lao Tzu and Christ.”
“Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat.”
“I cannot look at any green shoot sprouting from the soil without feeling that in that mystic presence I am closer to the essence of reality than when my grandson tries in vain to explain to me the marvels of the atom.”
“They thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda... the free press is everywhere the servant of its advertisers, of a pressure group, or of the government.”
“Only people who live on cement streets and carpeted floors can ever forget the inherent drama in nature and, by mere habits of city living, become nature-blind.”
“The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.”
“He talks to the plants and they answer him. He listens to the voices of all those who move upon the earth, the animals. He is as one with them. From all living beings, something flows into him all the time, and something flows from him.”
“Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan? [frog in slowly heating water]”
“If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.”
“The person who can most easily take up natural agriculture… has the mind and heart of a child. One must simply know nature . . . real nature, not the one we think we know!”
“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves…. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
'”
“In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.”
“Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything.”
“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
“downstream in this river of life, our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.”
“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and slaughters a visible Nature without realizing that this Nature he slaughters is the invisible God he worships.”
“nature allows no master over itself [but] We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization.”
“We can't leave people in abject poverty, so we need to raise the standard of living for 80% of the world's people, while bringing it down considerably for the 20% who are destroying our natural resources.”
“Most of us don't realize the difference we could make… point fingers at others. ‘Surely,’ we say, ‘the pollution, waste, and other ills are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They are the fault of the politicians,’ This leads to a destructive and potentially deadly apathy.”
“A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.”
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
“We are part of nature. Ultimately nature will always be more powerful than us, despite all our knowledge, technology, and super weapons.”
“Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves.”
“When man ceases to revere nature, his knowledge of nature also ceases to be fully integrated into his way of life.”
“Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.”
“Judaism, Christianity’s parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that the differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness.”
“Francis Bacon kept the famine imagery but turned it to rather different ends. He described nature as a 'common harlot' who needed to be 'tortured' in order to make her yield her secrets.”
“from the crow language… ‘Caw, caw, caw’ had become an English word - ‘Hawk!’”
“Above all, may individuals recognize that it is their greatest personal responsibility to implement the protection of the world's environment... May they crush the egotism and unlimited avarice that are our mighty foes in this degenerate age.”
“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the world; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
“We were all guilty. All complicit in the crime of attempting to enslave the world itself.”
“I expanded my love to include all of those on the train... for everyone in this entire world, the same for every pet, every wild animal, every insect, every rat that scurried by seeking happiness in a crumb.”
“The romantic contrast between modern industry that 'destroys nature' and our ancestors who 'lived in harmony with nature' is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”
“The yearning to live is something we share... this sense of having a living relationship with the earth's resources is necessary for us to change the way we relate to them and treat them.”
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