Henry Williamson Quotes

My engagement with mountains, rivers, and forests has been right from my childhood. I have lived in the jungles by myself; I have floated down rivers. So, I didn't experience these rivers, mountains, forests as some mythological figures but as thriving, living entities.

Yes, the natural world is the first and primary Bible. We have not honored it, so how could we, or would we, know how to honor and properly use the second Bible, when it was written.

I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

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

The world is a fascinating, difficult place, and in order to take full advantage of what the planet has to offer, we need to see and hear natural things.

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

There once was a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous. I immersed myself in nature, crawled, as it were, into the very essence of nature and away from the whole human world.

I'm sure I shall always feel like a child in the wood.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~ And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.

Nature is the living, visible garment of God.

Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.

There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.

Fishing should be a ceremony that reaffirms our place in the natural world and helps us resist further estrangement from our origins.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. It takes you to a place within yourself.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

I do believe my personal spirituality, which spirituality itself I don't really equate to anything more than my personal connection with nature and the universe. With what is real, not a manmade contrivance. Finding a connection with those things through my music is something I've begun to take more seriously in order to understand why I feel that way.

It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God.