The Life of the Fields Quotes

“The oaks stand - quite still - so still that the lichen loves them...such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted...it is necessary to stay in it like oaks to know it. (1884)”
― Jefferies Richard 1848-1887, The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jeffries ..

“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour 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, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“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.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“Never could I have enough; never stay long enough—whether here or whether lying on the shorter sward under the sweeping and graceful birches, or on the thyme-scented hills. Hour after hour, and still not enough. Or walking the footpath was never long enough, or my strength sufficient to endure till the mind was weary. The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour 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, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life of the Fields

“So trustful are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the creatures of the field. Under their tuition let us rid ourselves of mental terrors, and face death itself as calmly as they do the livid lightning; so trustful and so content with their fate, resting in themselves and unappalled. If but by reason and will I could reach the godlike calm and courage of what we so thoughtlessly call the timid turtle-dove, I should lead a nearly perfect life.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“Oak follows oak, and elm ranks with elm, however many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“The sound of summer is everywhere—in the passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad branching trees, in the grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the summer are in motion. The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades—for they would cover acres and square miles if reckoned edge to edge—are drawing their strength from the atmosphere. Exceedingly minute as these vibrations must be, their numbers perhaps may give them a volume almost reaching in the aggregate to the power of the ear”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“It is in this marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living things that the joy and the hope of summer reside. Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate floret and petal, is an inscription speaking of hope. So that my hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“Never yet have I been able to write what I feel about the sunlight only. Colour and form and light are as magic to me. It is a trance. It is ten years since I have reclined on that grass plot, and yet I have been writing of it as if yesterday, and every blade of grass is as visible and real to me now as then. That beautiful and wonderful light excited a sense of some likewise beautiful or wonderful truth, some unknown but grand thought hovering as a swallow above. There was something here that was not in the books of human knowledge. This is what it intends, this is the explanation of a dream. The very grass-blades confounded the wisest, the tender leaf put them to shame, the grasshopper derided them, the sparrow chirped his scorn.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“I can never read or write in summer out-of-doors. Only now and then, determined to write down this mystery and delicious sense while in it, I have brought ink and paper…three words, and where is the thought? Gone. The paper is so obviously paper, the ink so evidently ink. You want colour, flexibility, light, sweet low sound- all these to paint it and play it in music, at the same time you want something that will answer to and record in one touch the strong throb of life and the thought, or feeling, or whatever it is that goes out into the earth and sky and space, endless as a beam of light.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“The white dust heated by sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily masses trees, and the silence. Such solace and solitude cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far away enough in perspective. It is necessary to stand in it like the oaks to know it. And the silence is the silence of fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if a mare in the meadow shook herself, these were not sounds, but the silence itself. So sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemd to feel and know all that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“I cannot leave it; 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. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are not restless; they have so much time, you see. The flowers open, and remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life itself lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather more of it to me, could I do so.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“It is nothing to the green-finches; all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth. It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence. He shall take from all their beauty and enjoy their glory.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“The dust of the sunshine was borne along and breathed, steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing. It was life to breathe it, for the air itself was life. The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind. Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.”
― Richard Jefferies, The Life Of The Fields

“The hedges - yes, the hedges, the very synonym of Merry England - are yet there, and long may they remain. Without hedges England would not be England. Hedges, thick and high, and full of flowers, birds, and living creatures, of shade and flecks of sunshine dancing up and down the bark of the trees - I love their very thorns. You do not know how much there is in the hedges. (1884)”
― Jefferies Richard 1848-1887, The Life of the Fields, by Richard Jeffries ..