Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.

Nature is cold, wet, hard and unforgiving.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.

Nature is not benevolent; Nature is just, gives pound for pound, measure for measure, makes no exceptions, never tempers her decrees with mercy, or winks at any infringement of her laws.

The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it - and if you don't, you die.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

If we knew that tonight we were going to go blind, we would take a long, last real look at every blade of grass, every cloud formation, every speck of dust, every rainbow, raindrop-everything.

Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

Beauty never slumbers; All is in her name; But the rose remembers The dust from which it came.

Cold - cold as truth, cold as life. No, nothing can be as cold as life.

When the fire goes out, you'll start feeling the cold. You'll wake up whether you want to or not.

Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.

Nature does not cocker us: we are children, not pets: she is not fond: everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws.

Nature will kill you without a minute's thought, and in nastier ways than a crazy guy with agun. It doesn't make her any less beautiful.

Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

The wheel of a man's life. No mercy. No pity.

She could not ignore life. She had to live it and it was too brutal, too hostile, for her even to try to gloss over its harshness with a smile

The bathroom scale knows nothing of extenuating circumstances.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society.

The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable... and knows no kindness with all its beauty.

From inaccessible mountain range by way of desert untrod by human foot to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.

Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee, At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried, That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches.