Richard Jefferies Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

On the wings of the dragon fly as he hovers an instant before he darts there is a prismatic gleam. These wing textures are even more delicate than the minute filaments on a swallow's quill, more delicate than the pollen of a flower.

Richard Jefferies
In the mind all things are written in pictures - there is no alphabetical combination of letters and words; all things are pictures and symbols.

Richard Jefferies
As the wind, wandering over the sea, lakes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges - green waves arid billows - became full of fine atoms of summer.

Richard Jefferies
Only by walking hand in hand with nature, only by a reverent and loving study of the mysteries forever around us, is it possible to disabuse the mind of the narrow view, the contracted belief that time is now and eternity tomorrow. Eternity is to-day.

Richard Jefferies
Stoop and touch the earth, and receive its influence; touch the flower, and feel its life; face the wind, and have its meaning; let the sunlight fall on the open hand as if you could hold it. Something may be grasped from them all, invisible yet strong. It is the sense of a wider existence - wider and higher.

Richard Jefferies
I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air. It seems as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south winds calls into being.

Richard Jefferies
Winter shows us Matter in its dead form, like the primary rocks, like granite and basalt - clear but cold and frozen crystal.

Richard Jefferies
The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live,...All else is illusion, or mere endurance.

Richard Jefferies
Summer shows us Matter changing into life, sap rising from the earth through a million tubes, the alchemic power of light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts forth in countless leaves. Living things leap in the grass, living things drift upon the air, living things are coming forth to breathe in every hawthorn bush.

Richard Jefferies
The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is best in our hearts.

Richard Jefferies
I have observed that almost all those whose labour lies in the field, and who go down to their business in the green meadows, admit the animal world to a share in the faculty of reason. It is the cabinet makers who construct a universe of automatons.

Richard Jefferies
There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. I hope to launch it.

Richard Jefferies
Part and parcel as we are of the great community of living beings, indissolubly connected with them from the lowest to the highest by a thousand ties, it is impossible for us to escape from the operation of this law.

Richard Jefferies
The first conscious thought about wild flowers was to find out their names - the first conscious pleasure - and then I began to see so many that I had not previously noticed. Once you wish to identify them there is nothing escapes, down to the little white chickweed of the path and the moss of the wall.

Richard Jefferies
There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined.

Richard Jefferies
Fanning so swiftly, the wasp's wings are but just visible as he passes; did he pause, the light would be apparent through their texture.

Richard Jefferies
The whole time in the open air, resting at mid-day, under the elms with the ripple of heat flowing through the shadow; at midnight between the ripe corn and the hawthorn hedge on the white wild camomile and the poppy pale in the duskiness, with face upturned to the thoughtful heaven.

Richard Jefferies
The forest is gone; but the spirit of nature stays... and will always be.

Richard Jefferies
How can words depict the glowing wonder, the marvellous beauty of all the plant, the insect, the animal life, which presses upon the mental eye?

Richard Jefferies
It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.

Richard Jefferies