Spiritual Connection to Nature Quotes

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environmect or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.

Our connection to nature grounds us, it makes us more spiritually aware. We must keep the legacy of nature materially alive for future generations.

All the more I study Nature do I revere God, because Nature is all the body of God we will ever know.

My heart 's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart 's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.

Because God created the Natural - invented it out of His love and artistry - it demands our reverence.

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

The future of life on Earth depends on our ability to see the sacred where others see only the common

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

The Great Spirit made all things. He gave the white people a home beyond the great waters. He supplied these grounds with game, and gave them to his red children; and he gave them strength and courage to defend them.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.

We either have wild places or we don't. We admit the spiritual-emotional validity of wild, beautiful places or we don't. We have a philosophy of simplicity of experience in these wild places or we don't. We admit an almost religious devotion to the clean exposition of the wild, natural earth or we don't.

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight-in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm-is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science... Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen.

The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.

As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.

The great purpose is to set aside a reasonable part of the vanishing wilderness, to make certain that generations of Americans yet unborn will know what it is to experience life on undeveloped, unoccupied land in the same form and character as the Creator fashioned it... It is a great spiritual experience. I never knew a man who took a bedroll into an Idaho mountainside and slept there under a star-studded summer sky who felt self-important that next morning. Unless we preserve some opportunity for future generations to have the same experience, we shall have dishonored our trust.

When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one's body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.

Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.

In these gaudy times, we think we will shortly reach the point where everything is known, but the fact is we are ignoring the essential, which is love of all living things, of all beauty both visible and hidden.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object.

Once the Western mind was disconnected from its sense of divine responsibility and genuine reverence towards nature, all hell broke loose. And that’s where we are now.