If you’re looking for The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod quotes about nature, you’ve come to the right place. Here at Inspiring Lizard we collect thought-provoking quotes from interesting people and sources. And in this article we share a list of the 11 most interesting The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod quotes about nature from Henry Beston. Let’s get inspired!
The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod quotes about nature
To be able to see and study undisturbed the processes of nature–I like better the old Biblical phrase “mighty works”–is an opportunity for which any man might feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on natures’s sustaining and poetic spirit.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself. That immense, overwhelming, relentless, burning ardency of Nature for the stir of life! And all these her creatures, even as these thwarted lives, what travail, what hunger and cold, what bruising and slow-killing struggle will they not endure to accomplish earth’s purpose? and what conscious resolution of men can equal their impersonal, their congregate will to yield self life to the will of life universal?
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
…Nature has its unexpected and unappreciated mercies.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
And what of Nature itself, you say–that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for “red in tooth and fang, ” whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books. It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well 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. Live in Nature, and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for “red in tooth and fang, ” whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual. To share in it, one must have a knowledge of the pilgrimages of the sun, and something of the natural sense of him and feeling for him which made even the most primitive people mark the summer limits of his advance and the last December ebb of his decline. All those Autumn weeks I have watched the great disk going south along the horizon of moorlands beyond the marsh, now sinking behind this field, now behind this leafless tree, now behind this sedgy hillock dappled with thin snow. We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy and awe of it, not to share in it, isw to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. 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. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
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, The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
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