Henry Beston Quotes (13 Quotes)

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.

As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.

A garden is the mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse of the year, and pressing on and pausing the whole to its own inherent rhythms.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.

If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, 'watering the plants' and think of watering as a matter of 'watering the earth' under the plants, keeping up its moisture content and gauging its need, the garden will get on very well.

Do no dishonour to the earth least you dishonour the spirit of man.

The animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the sense we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas rest your spirit in her solitary places.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.