Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods! – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, “Inspiration”

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction. – E. O. Wilson

Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses, and violets, and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Progress of Culture”

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe. – John Berger, The Sense of Sight, 1980