Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Whatever trips you make, you must still have nature in your eye.

The place to observe nature is where you are.

By bringing nature into our lives, we invite humility.

Now that I'm older, I have a much better appreciation of nature, and I love being alone.

He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.

I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden.

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

There is not a sprig of grass that grows uninteresting to me.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

My mother loved to take us on walks in the mountains or the hills and she would point out different species that she identified, both fauna and flora.

The key to nature's therapy is feeling like a tiny part of it, not a master over it. There's amazing pride in seeing a bee land on a flower you planted - but that's not your act of creation, it's your act of joining in.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.

I love the Pembroke coastal path. Whenever I've been there, it's been sunny, but slightly bracing. So you're happy to keep walking, but you'll get a bit of a tan. The wildflowers and the insects are great and you'll occasionally see a small mammal.

We live in a world in which there are many live things other than human beings, and many of these things can seem beautiful and amusing and interesting to us if they can catch our attention and if we can step back from our crabbed and limiting and lonely anthropocentricity to consider them.

I think one of the most important things is just being outside and in touch with nature. You need it!

I have grown up on a diet of sunrise picnics, learning the names of butterflies, planting trees.

As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.

I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.

Greer is Missouri's second-largest spring. It is a place of pounding, frothing waters and of greeny-cool moss-covered rock, a place of fern and cliffy splendor.

to know a piece of grass, you’ve got to see the ground that grew it. Maybe that’s why I remember every detail of that night, every inch of ground we covered, as I followed Zach to the place that had made him, seeing them both with fresh eyes.

Long before I learned to do a sum in arithmetic or describe the shape of the earth, Miss Sullivan had taught me to find beauty in the fragrant woods, in every blade of grass, and in the curves and dimples of my baby sister's hand.

Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! He'd say, that’s grass! A pink blur! That’s a rose garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.