Nature's Duality Quotes

To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

She gazed toward the marsh that grew thicker, deeper, greener with approaching summer. Mosquitoes whined in there, breeding in the dark water. Alligators slid through it, silent death. It was a place where snakes could slither and bogs could suck the shoe right off your foot. And it was a place, she thought, that went bright and beautiful with the twinkling of fireflies, where wildflowers thrived in the shade and the stingy light. Where an eagle could soar like a king. There was no beauty without risk. No life without it.

Nature is a perfect example of the harmony between the beautiful and the brutal. You turn over a pretty rock and there are worms writhing underneath.

We live on a planet that is amazing, beautiful, and full of wonder but not protected from powerful destructive forces of nature. We are capable of doing wonderful and selfless things but also self-absorbed and harmful things. This is the world we live in.

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

I cut my bow from the wood of this tree of evil. Of this tree of good, I want a kiss from your lips.

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

My work is about the underbelly of the beauty of nature - and the dark side of nature is its indifference. Nature isn't friendly, nor is it unfriendly - it's the perfect embodiment of the Other.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.