John Burnside Quotes

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.

Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure.

I do believe very strongly that all of us and all of the other things in the context of our planet with Mother Nature, all of these things absolutely have a profound effect.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

I study nature, and I realize that no matter how much you learn, you can't top nature.

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.

All I want to do is to present the abundance of life on Earth.

The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.

I appreciate nature as well and everything green.

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

There is always something to see, if you only know how to look.