Nature & environment quotes, explained

The first line of Keats's long poem Endymion: beautiful things never lose their power to delight us, and their loveliness grows over time instead of fading.

Beautiful things do not need a purpose to justify them. A flower blooming where no one sees it is reason enough in itself.

Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.

Spencer's phrase for natural selection: organisms best suited to their environment survive and reproduce. “Fittest” means best adapted, not strongest.

The best part of a good person's life is not their big achievements but the small, everyday kindnesses that nobody records and they themselves forget.

Burns, having wrecked a mouse's nest with his plough, tells her that the best plans of mice and men often go wrong, and that he is worse off than her because he worries about the past and the future.

The person we are as children shapes the adult we become. Wordsworth hopes his grown-up self will keep the wonder he felt as a child seeing a rainbow.

An old joke about a cold summer, retold about many cities. Twain's papers contain nothing like it about San Francisco, though he did once retell an older version about Paris.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.