48 verified quotes from 26 writers, 1609 to 1923.
Quotes 1 to 24 of 48, page 1 of 2.
Many of the best-known lines about the natural world come from a handful of nineteenth-century books: Emerson’s Nature (1836), Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Whitman’s poems of the open road. They share a conviction that going outdoors is a way of thinking more clearly, not an escape from thinking.
Alongside them are John Muir in the Sierra Nevada, Tagore’s short verses, Grahame’s Mole spring-cleaning his home, and Anne Shirley, glad to live in a world where there are Octobers. Every quote below was found word for word in the edition we link, with a note of ours on its setting.
What “verified” means, and what we leave out: How we verify.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: …
Our note: The opening of Shakespeare's best-known sonnet.
Verified in the full text of Sonnet 18 on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #100 · Collected in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Painted the same decade: The Golden Age, Joachim Wtewael, 1605
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin
Our note: Ulysses on what all people share. In context he means our shared love of novelty.
Verified in the full text of Troilus and Cressida on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #100 · Collected in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Painted the same decade: A Woodland Road with Travelers, Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1607
It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other.
Our note: Bacon's calm start to an essay on the fear of dying.
Verified in the full text of Of Death on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #575 · Collected in Essays
Painted the same decade: The Denial of Saint Peter, Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 1610
And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Our note: The banished Duke on what life in the forest teaches.
Verified in the full text of As You Like It on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #100 · Collected in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Painted the same decade: A Cardinal's Procession, Ottavio Leoni (Il Padovano), 1621
…whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together
Our note: The opinion of the King of Brobdingnag, the land of giants.
Verified in the full text of Gulliver's Travels on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #829
Painted the same decade: The Triumph of Marius, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1729
He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all.
Our note: The Mariner's moral, near the poem's end.
Verified in the full text of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #151
Painted the same decade: Sebastián Martínez y Pérez (1747–1800), Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1792
One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
Our note: A verse urging the reader to put down books and learn from a walk in spring woods.
Verified in the full text of The Tables Turned on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #8905 · Collected in Lyrical Ballads
Painted the same decade: Sebastián Martínez y Pérez (1747–1800), Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1792
Nature never did betray The heart that loved her
Our note: From the poem of revisiting a river valley after five years.
Verified in the full text of Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #8905 · Collected in Lyrical Ballads
Painted the same decade: Sebastián Martínez y Pérez (1747–1800), Goya (Francisco de Goya y Lucientes), 1792
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; …
Our note: Emerson describes feeling at one with nature on a walk, in his first book.
Verified in the full text of Nature on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #29433
Painted the same decade: Hagar in the Wilderness, Camille Corot, 1835
In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child.
Our note: From the first chapter of "Nature."
Verified in the full text of Nature on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #29433
Painted the same decade: Mother and Child by the Sea, Johan Christian Dahl, 1830
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.
Our note: From the chapter "Beauty" in "Nature."
Verified in the full text of Nature on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #29433
Painted the same decade: Parochialstrasse in Berlin, Eduard Gaertner, 1831
In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society
Our note: Lockwood, the new tenant, on the remote moorland he has chosen.
Verified in the full text of Wuthering Heights on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #768
Painted the same decade: The Abduction of Rebecca, Eugène Delacroix, 1846
I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
Our note: The novel's last sentence, a calm look at the three graves on the moor.
Verified in the full text of Wuthering Heights on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #768
Painted the same decade: The Abduction of Rebecca, Eugène Delacroix, 1846
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.
Our note: Thoreau explains why he built a small cabin by Walden Pond and lived there for two years.
Verified in the full text of Walden on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #205
Painted the same decade: Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, Théodore Chassériau, 1851
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
Our note: Thoreau compares time to the shallow stream he fishes in, while eternity lies deeper.
Verified in the full text of Walden on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #205
Painted the same decade: Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, Théodore Chassériau, 1851
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Our note: Thoreau on noticing wonder in the ground beneath us, from the chapter on the pond in winter.
Verified in the full text of Walden on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #205
Painted the same decade: Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, Théodore Chassériau, 1851
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.
Our note: Thoreau describes his mornings at the pond.
Verified in the full text of Walden on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #205
Painted the same decade: Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable, Gustave Courbet, 1857
We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; …
Our note: From the chapter "Spring," on why people need wild places.
Verified in the full text of Walden on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #205
Painted the same decade: Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable, Gustave Courbet, 1857
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars
Our note: From "Song of Myself."
Verified in the full text of Song of Myself on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #1322 · Collected in Leaves of Grass
Painted the same decade: Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable, Gustave Courbet, 1857
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle
Our note: From a poem listing everyday things as miracles.
Verified in the full text of Miracles on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #1322 · Collected in Leaves of Grass
Painted the same decade: The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse, Adolph Menzel, 1851
Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Our note: From "Song of the Open Road."
Verified in the full text of Song of the Open Road on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #1322 · Collected in Leaves of Grass
Painted the same decade: Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable, Gustave Courbet, 1857
…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved
Our note: The last words of the first edition of the Origin.
Verified in the full text of On the Origin of Species on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #1228
Painted the same decade: The Artist's Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse, Adolph Menzel, 1851
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it
Our note: The narrator on how early years in one place bind us to the world.
Verified in the full text of The Mill on the Floss on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #6688
Painted the same decade: The Third-Class Carriage, Honoré Daumier, 1864
Nature's not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.
Our note: The young nihilist Bazarov on how to look at the natural world.
Verified in the full text of Fathers and Children on Project Gutenberg · Project Gutenberg ebook #30723
Painted the same decade: Oedipus and the Sphinx, Gustave Moreau, 1864
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