Henry Beston Quotes

#1. 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 integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.

Henry Beston

#2. Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man.

Henry Beston

#3. We need another and a wiser and a perhaps more mystical concept of animals.

Henry Beston

#4. ...Nature has its unexpected and unappreciated mercies.

Henry Beston

#5. Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.

Henry Beston

#6. The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.

Henry Beston

#7. 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.

Henry Beston

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

Henry Beston

#9. The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live ...

Henry Beston

#10. If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing-craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture.

Henry Beston

#11. Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

Henry Beston

#12. 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

Henry Beston

#13. The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.

Henry Beston

#14. Wolves are not our brothers; they are not our subordinates, either. They are another nation, caught up just like us in the complex web of time and life.

Henry Beston

#15. 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.

Henry Beston

#16. The animal should not be measured by man. In a world older 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.

Henry Beston

#17. 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. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.

Henry Beston

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

Henry Beston

#19. We of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea.

Henry Beston

#20. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

Henry Beston

#21. An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.

Henry Beston

#22. 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.

Henry Beston

#23. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life.

Henry Beston

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

Henry Beston

#25. 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.

Henry Beston

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

Henry Beston

#27. Poor body, time and the long years were the first tailors to teach you the merciless use of clothes. Though some scold today because you are too much seen, to my mind, you are not seen fully enough or often enough when you are beautiful.

Henry Beston