He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of connecting with nature through love to truly understand it.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote suggests that a deep appreciation and familiarity with nature can only be achieved through love. This connection allows individuals to engage more profoundly with the natural world, fostering a greater understanding of its beauty and complexity.
In practice
During a nature retreat, I shared this quote to inspire participants to cultivate a love for the outdoors.
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.
Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Of all wonders, this is among the greatest, that some fresh waters close by the sea spring forth as out of pipes: for the nature of the waters also ceaseth not from miraculous properties.
This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath.
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