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Quotes about nature, verified at the source

Updated on How we verify quotes

The forest, the shore, the starry sky: writers have found in them a consolation, a lesson or a mystery. These quotes about nature have been checked word for word in the original work.

To share with a travel photo, a spring card or a morning thought.

Contents

Formal

The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

William Wordsworth, The World Is Too Much with Us, opening lines, 1807 Verified quote Read its story
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Heartfelt

Originally in Arabic · English translation

A night like the waves of the sea lowered its curtains over me, bringing every kind of care to try me.

Imru’ al-Qays, معلقة امرئ القيس Sourced text Read the original and its meaning
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Originally in Arabic · English translation

I complain to the sea of my troubled thoughts; it answers with its raging winds.

Khalil Mutran, المساء (داء ألم فخلت فيه شفائي), من القصيدة، بعد وصف مرضه وغربته Sourced text Read the original and its meaning
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Originally in Arabic · English translation

Radiant spring has come to you, strutting and smiling with beauty, almost ready to speak.

Al-Buhturi, ديوان البحتري، قصيدة في وصف الربيع, مطلع القصيدة، كما أورده سيد قطب في «كتب وشخصيات» (1946) Sourced text Read the original and its meaning
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The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 Verified quote Read its story
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Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798 Verified quote Read its story
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I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 16 (Anne), 1908 Verified quote Read its story
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I wandered lonely as a Cloud that floats on high o'er Vales and Hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden Daffodils.

William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud, first stanza, revised text of Poems (1815); first published in 1807, 1815 Verified quote Read its story
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Inspiring

Originally in Arabic · English translation

You were created unbound as a passing breeze, and free as morning light in its sky.

Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, قصيدة «يا ابن أمي» (أغاني الحياة), مطلع القصيدة Sourced text Read the original and its meaning
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Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

John Muir, The Yosemite, chapter 16, “Hetch Hetchy Valley”, 1912 Verified quote Read its story
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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto IV, stanza 178, 1818 Verified quote Read its story
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In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Henry David Thoreau, Walking, The Atlantic Monthly, 1862 Verified quote Read its story
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To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, first lines (Pickering Manuscript), 1803 Verified quote Read its story
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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, 1854 Verified quote Read its story
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Short

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, chapter I, 1836 Verified quote Read its story
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