All quotes

Blessed is the one whom you choose and cause to come near, that he may live in your courts. We will be filled with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.

They also who dwell in faraway places are afraid at your wonders. You call the morning’s dawn and the evening with songs of joy.

You visit the earth, and water it. You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide them grain, for so you have ordained it.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Sitting down on a block of granite, it was delightful to watch the various insects and birds as they flew past.

This west coast makes me remember with pleasure the free, unbounded plains of Patagonia; yet, with the true spirit of contradiction, I cannot forget how sublime is the silence of the forest.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.

The forest is an eternal mediator between winds and gravity in their never-ending struggle for the possession of the waters.

Have you anything better or greater to see than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea?

My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel.

Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

This is a glorious region, and the air and life are intoxicating.

Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them.

The emotions excited by the songs of these thrushes belong to a higher order, springing as they do from our deepest sense of the beauty and harmony of the world.

A lunch of bread and cheese after a good walk is more enjoyable than a Lord Mayor's feast.

Any one who will sit down quietly on the grass and watch a little will be indeed surprised at the number and variety of living beings, every one with a special history of its own, every one offering endless problems of great interest.

How much more interesting would every walk in the country be, if Man would but treat other animals with kindness, so that they might approach us without fear, and we might have the constant pleasure of watching their winning ways.

Without water no landscape is complete, while overhead the clouds add beauty to the heavens themselves.

So far is a thorough love and enjoyment of travel from interfering with the love of home, that perhaps no one can thoroughly enjoy his home who does not sometimes wander away.

Everything kept in joyful rhythmic motion in the pulses of Nature's big heart.

The whole world seems richer now that I have found this plant in so noble a landscape.