When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness nor… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
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… — Henry Beston Copy Share
“It may seem odd to contemporary readers to think of the natural year as a metaphor by which we live. As individuals, we have become far removed from direct participation in the patterns and particularities of the changing seasons. Insulated, air-conditioned, and jet-propelled, we have come to believe that we are largely independent of the earth’s basic rhythms. If we… — Henry Beston Copy Share
The creatures with whom we share the planet and whom, in our arrogance, we wrongly patronize for being lesser forms, they are not brethren,… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions… — Henry Beston Copy Share
Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
“And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live. — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
The animal should not be measured by man. In a world older than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
If gardeners will forget a little the phrase, "watering the plants" and think of watering as a matter of "watering the earth" under the… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
We of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of… — Henry Beston Copy Share Image
