Florence Williams > Quotes

“Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off depression, lets go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Distilling what I learned, I came up with a kind of ultrasimple coda: Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or not. Breathe.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Muir wrote of time not in the wilderness: “I am degenerating into a machine for making money.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“If you have time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Human milk is like ice cream, penicillin, and the drug ecstasy all wrapped up in two pretty packages.”
― Florence Williams

“I personally like Oscar Wilde’s broad definition: “a place where birds fly around uncooked.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Nature appears to act directly upon our autonomic systems, calming us, but it also works indirectly, through facilitating social contact and through encouraging exercise and physical movement. (p,166)”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“A 2014 study estimated that trees in the United States remove 17.4 million tons of air pollution per year, providing 6.8 billion dollars in human health benefits.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. —EDWARD ABBEY”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. — JOHN MUIR”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“What else do you recommend?” I asked the middle-aged man with the bowl haircut. Clearly, Li gets asked this a lot. He had a small list. “If you have time for vacation, don’t go to a city. Go to a natural area. Try to go one weekend a month. Visit a park at least once a week. Gardening is good. On urban walks, try to walk under trees, not across fields. Go to a quiet place. Near water is also good.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“The idea of solvitur ambulando (in walking it will be solved) has been around since St. Augustine, but well before that Aristotle thought and taught while walking the open-air parapets of the Lyceum. It has long been believed that walking in restorative settings could lead not only to physical vigor but to mental clarity and even bursts of genius, inspiration (with its etymology in breathing) and overall sanity. As French academic Frederic Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking, it’s simply “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.” Jefferson walked to clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to think. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” Scotland”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“As French academic Frederic Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking, it’s simply “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.” Jefferson walked to clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to think. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Analyzing 98 buildings over two years, they found a striking correlation between the level of greenery and the number of assaults, homicides, vehicle thefts, burglary and arson.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“The difference in joy respondents felt in urban versus natural settings (especially coastal environments) was greater than the difference they experienced from being alone versus being with friends, and about the same as doing favored activities like singing and sports versus not doing those things. Yet, remarkably, the respondents, like me, were rarely caught outside. Ninety-three percent of the time, they were either indoors or in vehicles.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Williams and others have also noticed that high openness appears strongly related to the ability to recover from stressful events. So what does it mean to be “open”? The trait is broadly characterized as comfort with novelty and desire for “cognitive exploration.” To measure it, psychologists use the extensive five-trait questionnaire called the NEO (the abbreviation stands for the first three categories: neuroticism, extraversion, openness). The openness category breaks down into five clusters of questions designed to gauge imagination and fantasy, adventurousness, attentiveness to inner feelings, tolerance of others’ viewpoints and ideas, and ability to appreciate and be moved by aesthetic experiences. People scoring high on openness really feel things, and they’re tuned in to how they’re feeling them.”
― Florence Williams, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

“When we are relaxed and at ease in our environment, our parasympathetic system—sometimes called the “rest and digest” branch—kicks in. This is why food tastes better in the outdoors, explains Miyazaki.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“On average, study participants are significantly and substantially happier outdoors in all green or natural habitat types than they are in urban environments.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“To prove this, researchers collected undershirts of men who went skydiving for the first time. They then presented study subjects with either those shirts or ones worn by men who did nothing scary. The researchers measured elevated stress hormones only in the subjects who smelled the skydiver sweat. They smelled the terror and then caught it too. Fear detection is a handy skill in a social animal.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Primates who evolved in places seething with venomous snakes have better vision than primates who didn’t evolve in those places. But”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“The Japanese hinoki cypress was a favorite for its fast growth and uncanny ability to ward off pests.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“I didn’t yet realize it was okay to be broken, that it was even, perhaps, essential to becoming a more porous animal capable of far more real love than I had known was possible. It would still take some time for me to learn that our flaws are not the problem; rather, it is the failure to forgive them—in ourselves and in others—that trips up our hearts.”
― Florence Williams, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

“feeling rejected in this way increases blood pressure and raises cortisol levels while “reducing feelings of belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence.”
― Florence Williams, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

“As the epidemiologist Ian Alcock put it, if you want to be happy, there is a simple, scientific formula: “get married, get a job and live near the coast.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“Anxiety is just excitement without breath.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“I use a humidifier with cypress oil almost every night in the winter!” You don’t need to harvest your own; he said standard health-store aromatherapy oils should do the job.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“You can’t run away from pain for long. You must feel it and then you must wait. And yes, beauty could blow open the possibilities of”
― Florence Williams, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

“Walking was a philosophical act, facilitating a direct experience with divinity. It was a political act, mixing the educated classes up with the poor (who had always walked, doh). And it was an intellectual act, generating ideas and art. The ramblers of yore embraced a kind of radical common sense.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

“By his count, the entire continental United States has fewer than a dozen sites where you can’t hear human-made noise for at least fifteen minutes at dawn.”
― Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative