50 Connect with Nature Quotes

Welcome to our favorite 50 connect with nature quotes! There are many, many ways for us to connect with nature, and it has been a recurring topic of great thinkers, writers, artists, poets, philosophers, and explorers throughout history.

Connecting with nature is at the very heart of Personal Rewilding: without a deep bond with the natural world, we remain adrift in a human world of material accumulation and shallow interactions.

The path to establishing this kinship with the earth is different for each of us (and perhaps even different from day to day) but there are few better places to start looking than among the accumulated wisdom of the great thinkers and writers of history.

There are countless deep quotes about nature connection to choose from, from timeless writers like William Shakespeare to modern wordsmiths and environmentalists like Robert Macfarlane, but we’ve winnowed this list down to our “favorite” 50. (Though favorite is such a changeable, generic term.)

Connect with Nature Quotes (A-E)

"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see."

-Edward Abbey

"I have always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to town a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival."

- J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

"And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell, and I understood more than I saw, for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being."

-Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks

"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

"He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough."

-Ray Bradbury,  Fahrenheit 451

"To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life." 

-John Burroughs, Leaf and Tendril

"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."

-Joseph Campbell

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

"I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

-Willa Cather, My Antonia

"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, "A Day in the Country"

"I love ruins because they are always doing what everything really wants to do all the time: returning themselves to the earth, melting back into the landscape."

-Roger Deakin, Wildwood

“Inebriate of Air — am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From Inns of Molten Blue —” 

- Emily Dickinson,  “I Taste A Liquor Never Brewed”

"The texture of the world, it’s filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"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."

- Albert Einstein

"The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

"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. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows..."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Connect with Nature Quotes (F-O)

"If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys."

-Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh Nation

"Time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons."

-Thomas Christopher Greene, I’ll Never Be Long Gone

"The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms."

-Thich Nhat Hanh

"He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight."

-James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"To know fully even one field or one lane is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as one man can fully experience."

-Patrick Kavanagh

"We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put into the universe will always come back."

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

"Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe."

-D.H. Lawrence

"How lovely it is to lie in a field and dream. I lie on my back in a casual crucifix, which seems an instinctive shape, since it is both arms-wide welcome and submission before Nature."

-John Lewis-Stempel, Meadowland

"To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together."

-Barry Lopez

"Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands – a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in the world."

-Sidney Lovett

"Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long. The gorge-vision that the streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than glass, brick, concrete and tarmac...I have lived in Cambridge on and off for a decade, and I imagine I will continue to do so for years to come. And for as long as I stay here, I know I will have to also get to the wild places."

-Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

"Underfoot is a layer of heather, moss and lichen, soft as a winter duvet. I lie full-length in it and sink down a foot, the heather rising up and leaning over me in a gesture I experience as a sheltering."

-Robert Macfarlane, Underland

"No writing on the solitary, meditative dimension of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees."

-Thomas Merton

"The world is not to be put in order. The world is order. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order."

-Henry Miller

"Exhilarated with the mountain air, I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy."

-John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

"Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue."

-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

Connect with Nature Quotes (N-Z)

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

-Mary Oliver, from “The Summer Day”

"He felt his faith deeply, and above all out of doors, where the vaulted sky was his cathedral nave and the oaks its transept pillars; when faith failed, as it sometimes did, he saw the heavens declare the glory of God and heard the stones cry out."

-Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent

"Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open."

-Richard Powers, Orfeo

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one strand within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."

-Chief Seattle

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."

-William Shakespeare, Troilus & Cressida

"In September dawns I hardly breathe - I am an image in a ball of glass. The world is suspended there, and I in it."

-Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

"I learned from Mary Oliver how attention is a kind of love, how shining your mind’s light on a things – a grasshopper, a bird, a tree – is a way of showing gratitude…I learned from her to own my wonder and to stay open to uncertainty."

-Maggie Smith

"It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way."

-Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful."

-Alice Walker

"It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."

-Alan Watts

"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, Letters of E.B. White

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean
But I shall be good health to you nonetheless
And filter and fibre your blood.”

-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

-Walt Whitman

"What do we wish for? To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

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You can find more connect with nature quotes scattered throughout the site, so please - explore further, take a look around, find a lounge chair and pick up a book.

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