“Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road.”

On nature's cyclical presence and the quiet promise held in every parting · Essay, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

• Change
• Hope
• Nature

“The love of nature is a passion for those in whom it once lodges. It can never be quenched. It cannot change. It is a furious, burning, physical greed, as well as a state of mystical exaltation.”

Describing nature-love as both bodily hunger and spiritual elevation · Essay, The Spring of Joy, 1917

• Nature
• Passion
• Spirituality

“Nature's music is never over; her silences are pauses, not conclusions.”

Seeing natural quiet as part of an ongoing rhythm rather than an ending · Essay, The Spring of Joy, 1917

• Continuity
• Nature
• Silence

“Thrice blessed are they whose early years are spent in some countryside. The flowering and withering of the seasons, and every exquisite sound and sight make them affluent with a treasure which neither change nor chance can steal away.”

Praising the lasting wealth of rural childhood · A Victorian Village: Reminiscences of Other Days, 1929

• Childhood
• Memory
• Nature

“Poetry merely descriptive of nature, however vivid, no longer seems enough for me, there has to be added to it, the human judgement, the human evaluation.”

Shift from pure description toward human meaning · Autobiography, Life is My Song, 1937

• Judgement
• Nature
• Poetry

“What more inspiring than a calm, wide survey of them? In every dress nature is greatly charming! whether she puts on the crimson robes of the morning, the strong effulgence of noon, the sober suit of the evening, or the deep sables of blackness and tempest!”

Celebrating nature's beauty in every season and mood · Preface to Winter (second edition, 1726)

• Beauty
• Nature
• Wonder

“I know no subject more elevating, more amusing, more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of Nature. Where can we meet with such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”

Declaring nature the grandest theme for poetry, philosophy and moral feeling · Preface to Winter (second edition, 1726)

• Inspiration
• Nature
• Poetry

“The bee and spider, by a diverse power, Suck honey and poison from the selfsame flower.”

Observing how the same source can yield opposite results depending on the nature of the one who draws from it · Epigraph, A Poetical Rapsody (1611)

• Difference
• Nature
• Wisdom

“For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.”

Seeing flowers as a distinctive form of divine expression · Jubilate Agno

• God
• Nature
• Poetry

“Let me tell you, here are some colours, contemptible as they seem here, that are very hard to be got; and scarce any one of them, which, if it should be lost, I should not miss and be concerned about the loss of it too, once in the year.”

Defending the value of seemingly trivial fishing colours to a sceptical visitor · The Compleat Angler (dialogue on fly-fishing materials)

• Nature
• Passion
• Practicality

“I would not lie like a toad in a stone, or in a place strong enough for another to covet. Oh! no; let me lie where the green grass and the daisies grow, waving under the winds of the blue heaven.”

Preferring a simple natural resting place over a grand tomb · Conversation with Sir Francis Chantrey

• Death
• Nature
• Simplicity

“We must wait for Spring to come: till the grasses sprout and the trees bloom. Then wandering together in the spring hills we shall see the trout leap lightly from the stream, the white gulls stretch their wings, the dew fall on the green moss.”

Original: 當待春中。草木蔓發。春山可望。輕鯈出水。白鷗矯翼。露濕青臯。 — An invitation that blends seasonal renewal with the hope of renewed friendship and shared contemplation of nature. · Letter to Pei Di (Chinese)

• Friendship
• Hope
• Nature

“Custom that is before all Law, Nature that is above all Art.”

Defending the natural fitness of English rhyme against classical imitation · Essay, A Defence of Rhyme (1603)

• Nature
• Poetry
• Tradition

“When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness.”

Describing the quiet bliss of early solitude among flowers · An Island Garden

• Happiness
• Nature
• Solitude

“Like the musician, the painter, the poet and the rest, the true lover of flowers is born, not made.”

Comparing the gift for gardening to other artistic vocations · An Island Garden

• Beauty
• Nature
• Vocation

“Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof.”

Marvelling at the latent beauty contained in a seed · An Island Garden

• Creation
• Nature
• Wonder

“This very act of planting a seed in the earth has in it to me something beautiful. I always do it with a joy that is largely mixed with awe.”

Finding wonder and reverence in ordinary gardening · An Island Garden

• Joy
• Nature
• Wonder

“I was born beneath quiet hills, among green pastures, beside still waters. My first companion was a little stream, my earliest counsellor an ancient Book.”

Evoking the formative influences of landscape and scripture · Autobiographical remark

• Childhood
• Faith
• Nature

“He that is born to be a man, neither should nor can be anything nobler, greater, or better than a man. The fact is, that in efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.”

Warning against attempts to transcend ordinary human nature · Marginalia

• Ambition
• Humanity
• Nature

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.”

Placing the soul’s mediation at the centre of artistic creation · Marginalia

• Art
• Nature
• Soul

“Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it”

Evoking the folklore bound to the Irish landscape through the language · Essay, A Plea for the Irish Language, 1886

• Language
• Legend
• Nature

“Nothing here to go with me into the depths of myself. The sterile landscape, the wintry wind these gray wailing waters benumb me, or rouse me to deep melancholy.”

Conveying isolation and the failure of surroundings to answer inner needs · Letter to Margaret Sweat, December 1852

• Melancholy
• Nature
• Solitude

“There are times when the eternal repose of nature—her unsympathizing fierceness mock and imitate the soul, thus it is now. I wish for my likeness in turbulent souls.”

Expressing a preference for intense, restless affinities over nature’s indifferent calm · Letter to Margaret Sweat, 4 June 1852

• Nature
• Solitude
• Soul

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

Refuses to set the mind apart from the natural world · Adagia, notebook aphorisms

• Creation
• Imagination
• Nature