55 Beautiful Nature Quotes that Sing Mother Earth’s Praises

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness.” —Leo Tolstoy

“‘Is the spring coming?’ he said. ‘What is it like?’ … ‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth.'” —Frances Hodgson Burnett

“He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.” —Jack London

“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

“These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” —Anton Chekhov

“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.” —Jane Austen

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me, older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.” —Robinson Jeffers

“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.” —Robert Frost

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” —Henry David Thoreau

“Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.” —Haruki Murakami

“The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning.” —Beth Revis

“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

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” —John Muir

“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

“If I were a tree, I would have no reason to love a human.” —Maggie Stiefvater

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.” —Gary Snyder

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” —William Blake

“Where you tend a rose, a thistle cannot grow.” —Frances Hodgson Burnett 

“Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.” —Emily Dickinson

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” —Rabindranath Tagore

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” —John Keats

“Quiet stars and the still of expectation. The eucalyptus branches heavy with evening dew, their feet shuffling woodchips, braiding eights in the silver grass, and edging hillocks from the first mulch of fall.” —Will Chancellor

“The world’s big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” —John Muir

“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.” —John Ruskin

“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

“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 

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that after night, dawn comes, and spring after the winter.” —Rachel Carson

“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.” —Galileo Galilei

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” —Rabindranath Tagore

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.” —Jack Kerouac

“The light in space, when you’re in the sunlight, is the brightest, whitest, purest light I have ever experienced.” —Michael Massimino

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” —Robert Frost 

“The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.” —Chinese proverb

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” —Margaret Atwood

“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. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.” —Anne Frank

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more.” —George Gordon Byron

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” —Cormac McCarthy

“Where flowers bloom so does hope.” —Lady Bird Johnson

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…. We need silence to be able to touch souls.” —Mother Teresa

“Nature never hurries. Atom by atom, little by little she achieves her work.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.” —Vincent Van Gogh

“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.” —Henry David Thoreau

“Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.” —Henry Ward Beecher

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” —Lao Tzu

“Choose only one master—Nature.” —Rembrandt

“All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.” —Marie Curie

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” —Walt Whitman

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” —Iris Murdoch

“Flowers are one of the few things we buy, bring home, watch die, and we don’t ask for our money back.” —George Carlin

“For nature is an image of Grace, and visible miracles are images of the invisible.” —Blaise Pascal

“The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.” —Claude Monet

Now that you’ve had your fill of nature quotes, try these powerful quotes about life that will stay with you.

Why trust us

At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece on kindness quotes, Lindsay Tigar tapped her experience as a lifestyle reporter to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Ambrose Martose, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including National Geographic Adventure and Popular Mechanics, verify that all quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.