As forest schoolers, we spend a lot of time observing and experiencing nature. These are a few of my favorite nature quotes! I’ve tried to provide links to where the quotes originate from. These are some of my favorite books and writers who have inspired me to incorporate nature and outdoor play in my children’s education.
Nature Quotes
“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” John Muir
“Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” John Muir
“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” Anatole France
“Outside, quiet children start to talk more and children who find it hard to be constrained begin to relax. Children need to be outside long enough to feel at home there.” Emma Shaw
“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.” Linda Hogan
“Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.” Richard Louv
“As children observe, reflect, record, and share nature’s patterns and rhythms, they are participating in a process that promotes scientific and ecological awareness, problem solving, and creativity.” Deb Matthews Hensley
“No matter how old you get, may you always stop to fill your pockets with smooth stones, empty snail shells & other little treasures.” Nicolette Sowder
“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” Khalil Gibran
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach of us more than we can ever learn from books.” John Lubbock
“Nature is a tool to get children to experience not just the wider world, but themselves.” Stephen Moss
“Children still need a childhood with dirt, mud, puddles, trees, sticks, and tadpoles.” Brooke Hampton
“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” Frank Lloyd Wright
“Let Nature be your teacher.” William Wordsworth
“Show the children every winged thing. The bees, dragonflies, queen ants, bluebirds, luna moths & swallowtails. Creatures that inspire them to defy gravity.” Nicolette Sowder
“Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.” Paul Berg
“If having endured much, we at last asserted our ‘right to know’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals, we should look around and see what other course is open to us.” Rachel Carson
“Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.” Valerie Andrews
“Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.” Richard Paul Evans
“Playing in natural spaces supports a child’s sense of self, allowing children to recognise their independence alongside an interdependence and connectedness with their ecological worlds.” Stuart Lester and Martin Maudsley
“It’s a wondrous thing how the wild calms a child.”
Notebooks for Forest Schoolers and Nature Loving Kids
