"Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more."

Vincent van Gogh

March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890

"Each moment of the year has its own beauty . . . a picture which was never before and shall never be seen again."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882

"Nature and peace are my shelter and companion."

Wayne Kramer

"[Butterflies are] not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures."

Elizabeth Goudge

April 24, 1900 - April 1, 1984

"Everything in life is speaking in spite of it's apparent silence."

Hazrat Inayat Khan

July 5, 1882 - February 5, 1927

"The butterfly is a flying flower, the flower a tethered butterfly."

Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

August 11, 1729 - August 31, 1807

"The meaning of the life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found ... by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can."

Paul Kurtz

born December 21, 1925

"Little flower, but if I could understand, what you are, root and all in all, I should know what God and man is."

Alfred Tennyson

August 6, 1809 - October 6, 1892

"Lichens are a successful alliance between a fungus and an alga. Each doing what it does best, and thriving as a result of a natural cooperation. They live as one organism, both inhabiting the same body."

Oregon State University Lichenland

"It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves."

Edmund Hillary

July 20, 1919 - January 11, 2008

"Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life. And everyone deserves a little sunshine."

Jeffrey Glassberg

"Memories are forget-me-nots gthered along life's way. Pressed close to the human heart into a perennial bouquet."

Clara Smith Reber

"Butterflies are self propelled flowers."

R. H. Heinlein

"Flowers have a mysterious and subtle influence upon the feelings, not unlike some strains of music. They relax the tenseness of the mind."

Henry Ward Beecher

June 24, 1813 - March 8, 1887

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864

"A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen."

Henry David Thoreau

July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862

"When words escape, flowers speak."

Bruce W. Currie

"I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence."

Aldous Huxley

July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963

"Be like the flower, turn your faces to the sun."

Kahlil Gibran

January 6, 1883 - April 10, 1931

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

John James Audubon

April 26, 1785 - January 27, 1851