Top 40 Henry Beston Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Henry Beston

Featured in: Nature Quotes, Rain Quotes, Quotes About Ocean

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.”

— Henry Beston

6. “The creatures with whom we share the planet and whom, in our arrogance, we wrongly patronize for being lesser forms, they are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the Earth.”

— Henry Beston

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

— Henry Beston

8. “Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.”

— Henry Beston

9. “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

10. “We need another and a wiser and a perhaps more mystical concept of animals.”

— Henry Beston

11. “The seas are the hearts blood of the earth. Plucked up and kneaded by the sun and the moon, the tides are systole and diastole of earth’s veins.”

— Henry Beston

12. “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

13. “Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.”

— Henry Beston

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “As well expect Nature to answer your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.”

— Henry Beston

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

— Henry Beston

22. “The world today 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 june these elemental presences lived and had their being...”

— Henry Beston

23. “The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods.”

— Henry Beston

24. “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 nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.”

— Henry Beston

25. “The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live...”

— Henry Beston

26. “To know only artificial night is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

— Henry Beston

27. “I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman’s relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance... When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.”

— Henry Beston

28. “Nature is part our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. 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 and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”

— Henry Beston

29. “Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man.”

— Henry Beston

30. “The seas are the heart’s blood of the earth.”

— Henry Beston

31. “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

32. “Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it.”

— Henry Beston

33. “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

34. “The quality of life, which in the ardour of spring was personal and sexual, becomes social in midsummer.”

— Henry Beston

35. “Winter farewell, winter farewell, and away you go and trouble us no more.”

— Henry Beston

36. “Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.”

— Henry Beston

37. “As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.”

— Henry Beston

38. “Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean – their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals. IV.”

— Henry Beston

39. “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. By day, space is one with the earth and with man – it is his sun that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is his no more.”

— Henry Beston

40. “Of all such appeals to sensory recollection, none are more powerful, none open a wider door in the brain than an appeal to the nose. It is a sense that every lover of the elemental world ought to use, and, using, enjoy. We ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive. Had we done so, we should never have built a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them, indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense grown duller.”

— Henry Beston

41. “The world today 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.”

— Henry Beston

42. “A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.”

— Henry Beston

43. “Man can either be less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread.”

— Henry Beston

44. “A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.”

— Henry Beston

45. “There is only one test of any political scheme or adventure in government. It is the quality of the human being produced by the political order and by the way of life occasioned by that order.”

— Henry Beston

46. “It is enough to say that prophets of expediency who are careless of the means they use and who work outside the human and moral values, have never been able to build anything humanly worth while.”

— Henry Beston