From the Andes Mountains to the Grand Canyon, from Niagara Falls to Kilauea, nature is truly awe-inspiring. But you don't have to travel to a famous marvel to delight in and draw inspiration from the natural world. Nature's wonders are all around us and as close to home as the local park, a community garden, or your own backyard.
When life gets hectic and stressful, why not take a moment to reflect on the gifts and lessons nature has to offer? We've gathered 70+ quotes to get you started. From novelists, poets, activists, and renowned nature lovers such as Emerson and Thoreau, these wise and uplifting words encourage you to ponder nature's magic and power as well as reaffirm why we need to be mindful of how we treat our precious natural world.
On nature's magic and mysteries
“Throw a stone into the stream and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“Some animals of old have said it was the trees themselves that taught them to speak, for they never make an unnecessary sound." - Andrew Krivak, The Bear
“Then the white doe lifted her head and looked at Marie across the pond; looked her entire self into the girl. She spoke something there into the wordlessness at the center of Marie. Time stilled. The forest watched. Then the doe turned and with a single bound disappeared into the shrubbery with the fawn leaping behind.” - Lauren Groff, Matrix
“Winter is the truest of the seasons. It’s what remains after everything else is stripped away. The leaves fall. The colors fade. The branches get brittle. And if you can love the earth, understand it when all the beauty is gone and see it for what it is, that’s magic.” - Rachel Griffin, The Nature of Witches
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.’” - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
“Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.” - Lauren DeStefano, Wither
“Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered.” - Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
“Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“It seems the forest always remembers.” - Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree
“There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.” - Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders
“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.” - Christopher Paolini, Eragon
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“A good river is nature's life work in song." - Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka
“Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.” - Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"There is no such thing as magic, though there is such a thing as a knowledge of the secrets of Nature." - H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure
On nature's power to comfort and uplift us
“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.” - Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“If anyone would understand loneliness, the moon would.” – Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’” - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it … Put yourself in the way of beauty.” - Cheryl Strayed, Wild
“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn." - John Muir, The Mountains of California
"I prefer spring. All that hope, everything waiting to come to life." - Beth O'Leary, The No-Show
“He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.” - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward.” -Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
“We need the tonic of wildness.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.” - Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walking
“Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” - John Muir, Our National Parks
"There is a time for stillness, but who hasn’t also wanted to scream with delight at being outdoors? To simply announce themselves and say, I’m here, I exist?" - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders
"If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” - Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
"Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships." - Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter." - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
On nature's might and grandeur
“Some trees aren’t meant to sprout tender new branches, but to stand stoically on the forest floor, silently decaying.” - Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures
“Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth." - Robert Macfarlane, Underland
“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names.” - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
“It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” - Cheryl Strayed, Wild
“Everything about her is captivating, like the aftermath of a storm. People aren’t supposed to get pleasure out of the destruction Mother Nature is capable of, but we want to stare anyway.” - Colleen Hoover, Never Never
“Nature puts no question and answers none which mortals ask.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.” - Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning; the mountains are." - Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
“All good things are wild and free.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walking
On our profound connection with nature
“We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests.” - Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations
"But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come." - Jack London, The Call of the Wild
“My father used to say the world turned wrong when we started separating ourselves from the wild, when we stopped being one with the rest of nature, and sat apart.” - Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves
“The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
“What if a family isn't a tree at all? What if it's more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought.” - Michael Christie, Greenwood
“It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.” - Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations
“If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations.” - Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing
"It fulfills a deep and instinctive urge to plug into the rhythms of what is happening around us. It makes us part of something larger and gives us a sense of our place on earth." - Amy Tan, The Backyard Bird Chronicles
“And as life began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb.” - Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
“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
“The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.” - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
On our calling to care for nature
“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.” - Richard Powers, The Overstory
“Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us.” - Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
“Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
“I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing—not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of.” - Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
“If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.” - Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
“Under a brilliant moon, and unbeknownst to us, the darkened world silvers and shimmers from pink and ebony wings, a small thunder. We can’t possibly hear such an astonishing wind while we try to keep in step with our small dances on this earth. But we should try. We should try.” - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders
“Oh, this planet was a good one, and we too were good—as good as the burn of the sun, and the rain's sting and the smell of living soil—the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.” - Richard Powers, Bewilderment
“We kill all the caterpillars, then complain there are no butterflies.” -John Marsden, The Dead of Night
“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.” - Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
“It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies.” - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
“If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.” - Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys
“In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walking
