Nature as a Teaching Tool

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.

~George Washington CarverNature is the art of God.
~Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1635

God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars. ~Martin Luther

He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
~ Thomas Fuller

Nature does nothing in vain.
~ Aristotle

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, 1599

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When one tugs at a single thing in nature; he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
~ John Muir

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not…
~ Georgia O’Keffe

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
~ Pascal

Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.
~ William Cowper, The Task

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
~ Romans 1:20

…the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
~ Romans 8:21

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. ~Henry David Thoreau, journal, 5 January 1856

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
~Eleonora Duse

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
~George Washington Carver

I’ll tell you how the sun rose a ribbon at a time.
~Emily Dickinson

Art gallery? Who needs it? Look up at the swirling silver-lined clouds in the magnificent blue sky or at the silently blazing stars at midnight. How could indoor art be any more masterfully created than God’s museum of nature?
~Grey Livingston

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
~Kahlil Gibran

To one who has been long in city pent,
‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven, – to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
~John Keats, Sonnet XIV

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
~ Psalm 19:1 (A Psalm of David)

Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed. Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
~ Carl G. Boberg and R.J. Hughes, How Great Thou Art (hymn)

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
~William Shakespeare

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
~Lao Tzu