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Wisdom from the Chaplains in Nature's Sanctuary
"The true Bible is the book of nature, the wisest teacher is the one who most plainly expounds it, the best priest our own conscience, and the most orthodox church a hall of science." Frances Wright Reason, Religion, and Morals
"I suppose that what in others is religion is in me love of nature." Henry Thoreau Journals
“Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God.” Henry Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
"More and more, in a place like this, we feel ourselves a part of wild Nature, kin to everything." John Muir My First Summer in the Sierra
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” John Muir The Yosemite
“[I see] the whole circle of persons and things. . . as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul.” Waldo Emerson Nature
“What this hesitation arose from, I know not; perhaps it was a feeling of my unworthiness to enter this temple which nature has erected to its God.” Margaret Fuller Summer on the Lakes
“We two, how long we were fool'd, Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes, We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side. . . We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again. . ." Walt Whitman We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd
"Spontaneous me, Nature, The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with. . . the real poems.” Walt Whitman Spontaneous Me
"When we call the power back of all 'God,' it smells of creeds and systems of superstition, intolerance, persecution; but when we call it Nature, it smells of spring and summer, of green fields and blooming groves, of birds and flowers and sky and stars. I admit that it smells of tornadoes and earthquakes, of jungles and wildernesses, of disease and death, too, but these things make it all the more real to us." John Burroughs Accepting the Universe
"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." William Shakespeare
As You Like It "Religion becomes sinful when it begins to advocate the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls." Abraham Joshua Heschel God in Search of Man
"When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness. In this hour divinely fresh and still, the fair face of every flower salutes me with a silent joy that fills me with infinite content."
An Island Garden
"God was as real to me then [as a child] as the wind that rustled through the trees in our garden. God somehow cared for a magical world, full of fascinating animals and people who were mostly friendly and kind. It was an enchanted world for me, full of joy and wonder, and I felt very much a part of it." Jane Goodall Reason for Hope
"There is grandeur in this view of life. . . Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Charles Darwin The Origin of Species
"Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!" Percy Blythe Shelley Hymn to the Spirit of Nature
"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 Inversnaid
"I thank Thee, Author of this opening day! Thou, whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies! Riches denied, Thy boon was purer joys, What wealth could never give nor take away!" Robert Burns Sonnet (1793)
“Plunge into matter…Plunge into God. By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.” Teilhard de Chardin The Divine Milieu
"It is not by considering what you are doing elsewhere that I shall become what you wish me to. It is by accepting your presence in everything. . . What folly not to breathe the air, walk with unfaltering step in the open country, find water in a flood; not to discover God, not to perceive God's bounty in all things!" Jean-Pierre De Caussade The Sacrament of the Present Moment
"I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals." Mikhael Gorbachev From the Universal Pantheist Movement website
"Meanwhile the great Canyon endures. It was here before humankind was even a twig on the evolutionary tree of life and it will be here when we are gone. . . A humbling thought? Not necessarily. The grandeur of the Canyon confers dignity on every form of life that touches it. Through our love. . .we share in its beauty, power, glory, and sublimity. It is an honor to be a visitor. . .as it is an honor and a privilege to be alive, however briefly, on this rare, sweet, delicate, one and one only planet we call Earth." Edward Abbey One Life at a Time, Please
"And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of [humanity]: a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things." William Wordsworth "On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye, 1798"
"[W]e eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more than the body of the world." Michael Pollan The Omnivore's Dilemma
"Hence without parent by spontaneous birth Rise the first specks of animated earth; From Nature's womb the plant or insect swims, And buds or breathes, with microscopic limbs. IN earth, sea, air, around, below, above, Life's subtle woof in Nature's loom is wove." Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather) The Temple of Nature (1803)
"To Thee, whose Temple is all Space, Whose Altar, Earth, Sea, Skies: One Chorus let all Being raise! All Nature's Incense rise!" Alexander Pope The Universal Prayer (1738)
"I beseech you, my brothers [and sisters], remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes." Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"Never before have I lived through a storm like the one this night… The sea has a look of indescribable grandeur, especially when the sun falls on it. One feels as if one is dissolved and merged into Nature. Even more than usual, one feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy." Albert Einstein Albert Einstein: The Human Side, December 10, 1931
"There is no need to build an altar, especially in the wild. There is no need to alter the sanctuary of the earth. The earth alters us, teaches us. Nature is full of altars. Nature is one great altar- not for sacrifice or ritual not for separation of humanity and divinity but for a grateful participation and pure delight in Beauty." Chris Highland
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