SOMETHING OF THE MARVELOUS

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Aristotle

Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth
find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carlson

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands
through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

Aldo Leopold

I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery,
feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it
 and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is perfect and why.

Jane Goodall

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man
if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature
and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E.B. White

Our task must be to free ourselves . . .
by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Einstein

Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.

Walt Whitman

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Keats

MEDITATIONS ON NATURE

If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make anything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture.

Henry Beston

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of the fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman 

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.

Rachel Carson 

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

 John Muir

Only spread a fern-frond over a man's head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in.

John Muir 

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness.  This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of all . . . There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy.  It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.

Thomas Merton 

Look!  Look!  Look deep into nature and you will understand everything.

Albert Einstein

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E.B. White 

The earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Henry David Thoreau

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

                                         i thank You God for this most amazing

                                         day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees

                                         and a blue dream of sky; and for everything

                                         which is natural which is infinite which is yes

e.e. cummings

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

The world will never starve for wonder, but only for want of wonder.

C.K. Chesterton

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains?  Nature remains.

Walt Whitman

Notes on Photos:  All photos were taken in the last couple of days here in coastal South Carolina.