John Greenleaf Whittier Quotes

Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles; but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike.

Nature's far too subtle to repeat herself.

Perfect is very boring, and if you happen to have a different look, that's a celebration of human nature, I think. If we were all symmetrical and perfect, life would be very dull.

Their every instinct - and I have to say this is without exception - is to iron out the bumps, and It's always the bumps that are the most interesting stuff.

I hate a style, as I do a garden, that is wholly flat and regular; that slides along like an eel, and never rises to what one can call an inequality.

If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.

It's so fascinating to think about how each snowflake is completely individual - there are millions and millions of them, but each one is so unique.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice.

If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers.

In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.

I had wondered for a long time why God had preferences and why all souls did not receive an equal amount of grace [...] Jesus saw fit to enlighten me about this mystery. He set the book of nature before me and I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. I realized that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wild flowers to make the meadows gay.

The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of it’s scent nor the daisy of its simple charm. If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.

A rose can never be a sunflower, and a sunflower can never be a rose. All flowers are beautiful in their own way, and that's like woman too.

The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike.

Nature does not turn out her work according to a single pattern; she prides herself upon her power of variation.

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

each separate flower has a magic all its own.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Unfortunately, nature seems unaware of our intellectual need for convenience and unity, and very often takes delight in complication and diversity.

The gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap.

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth