“Colours are the smiles of nature.”

Finding a human warmth and expressiveness in the natural world · Prose essay

• Beauty
• Nature

“There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon.”

Capturing a moment of serene natural beauty · Essay or conversation (commonly attributed)

• Beauty
• Nature
• Peace

“Had Shelley only lived longer, he might have succeeded in harmonising his views of Nature with those so luminously developed by Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and other scientific thinkers.”

Imagining how a longer life might have brought Romantic poetry into dialogue with evolutionary science · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

• Nature
• Poetry
• Time

“Nature is loved by what is best in us.”

Links our response to the natural world with the highest part of human character · Essay, Nature, Essays: Second Series (1844)

• Beauty
• Love
• Nature

“Nature, endlessly prolific Nature, assumes a new shape at every turn.”

Celebrating nature's inexhaustible variety · Autobiographical fragment, Chapter III (published posthumously, 1877)

• Beauty
• Nature

“To lie on one’s loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is better. It is over the hill the wonders are.”

Making curiosity and movement the route to discovery and wonder · Mearing Stones, Lying and Walking

• Hope
• Joy
• Nature

“The true light of nature is the human eye.”

Suggesting that nature becomes meaningful through human perception · Essay, Poetical Integrity

• Beauty
• Nature

“Where can we meet with such variety, such beauty, such magnificence? All that enlarges and transports the soul?”

Nature presented as inexhaustible spectacle and enlargement of the mind · Preface to Winter, 1726

• Beauty
• Nature
• Wonder

“I am sure there is a moon, for she looks in at my window every night, and keeps me awake with her cold bright eyes, which, I scarcely know why, always seem to speak of the past.”

Turning moonlight into an evocative presence associated with memory · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Beauty
• Memory
• Nature

“Man himself gains in moral value, when one reflects that with infinite pain and struggle he has slowly risen above the thraldom of physical nature.”

Finding moral dignity in humanity's painful rise beyond physical compulsion · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

• Hope
• Nature
• Truth

“Rocks and sea do not lose, but gain, in beauty and sublimity, from rough weather.”

Finding heightened beauty in nature when it becomes wild and turbulent · Letter to Sarah Rose, 26 November 1832

• Beauty
• Nature

“Religion is not religion until it has become, not only natural, but so natural that nothing else seems natural in its presence.”

Describing mature faith as something assimilated completely into ordinary life · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Homo

• Faith
• Nature

“The surrounding natures must catch a portion of it, as of a portion of the sun or air, and diffuse it in their turn.”

Describing goodness as something naturally shared and renewed · Autobiographical fragment, Chapter I (published posthumously, 1877)

• Hope
• Kindness
• Nature

“I have taken up arms for the fields and rivers along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them.”

Defines military service through attachment to the landscape of home · Letter to his publisher, 9 April 1915

• Duty
• Home
• Nature

“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.”

Energies branded sinful are recast as divine abundance · Proverbs of Hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• Desire
• Gods
• Nature

“A tree is a good illustration of the Law of a Poem, but the higher forms of creation are better.”

Comparing artistic unity with the organic unity of living nature · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Nature
• Poetry

“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”

Links receptiveness to nature with preserving the perceptiveness of childhood · Essay, Nature (1836)

• Childhood
• Nature

“It's a fact, true as the seasons, that the captain doesn't mix himself up in his talk of The Cause.”

Presenting self-effacement as a defining trait · Short story, The Captain and the Miracle (1918)

• Nature
• Truth
• War

“Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, but is supernaturally natural.”

Expressing Patmore's conviction that spiritual fulfilment completes rather than suppresses nature · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XVII

• Faith
• Nature

“Fill the lungs full—every cell—with fresh air, two or three times daily, and do not overload the digestive organs, and sickness will fly away to the dark regions where it belongs.”

A colourful example of her New Thought-era beliefs about health · Essay, The Breath

• Discipline
• Health
• Nature

“Nature is ever economical, and souls are her very dearest commodity.”

A playful reflection on the singular value of individual souls · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1888

• Mortality
• Nature

“The country is not a place to escape to, but a place to live in.”

Emphasizing rural life as an inhabited reality rather than a romantic retreat · Prose essays, as commonly attributed

• Beauty
• Nature

“Fast as a racehorse, graceful as a fay, the white English Setter gallops gaily through a hundred years, and more, of English sport.”

Capturing speed and grace in a single image · Book, Gun-Dogs (1931), English Setter chapter

• Beauty
• Nature

“I want to see again my wonderful mother, and to walk by the Boyne to Crewbawn and up through the brown and grey rocks of Crocknaharna.”

Brings together longing for family and the remembered landscape of home · Letter to Katharine Tynan, 20 July 1917

• Home
• Motherhood
• Nature