Nature Quotes

He tousled Baby's hair, then looked up at Tiger Lily. "The woods have rules." He put Baby down gingerly in his trough with his bottle. "But the rules are ugly.""It's nature," she said, thoughtfully."I have a lot of disagreements with nature," he said, looking confused, and his downy brow wrinkled over his eyes.

Jodi Lynn Anderson

Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!

Erasmus Darwin

Living with love for all humankind and worshiping nature’s immense beauty cures heartache and restores bliss. Respecting the splendor of nature awakens us to the beauty inscribing our own humanity.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. [Michael Faraday] was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion.

John Tyndall

There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.

Curtis Bill Pepper

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.

Eula Biss

People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best -- and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow. I do not understand people who find a winter evening forbidding.

Murasaki Shikibu

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

Leon M. Lederman

Can there be any question that the human is the least harmonious beast in the forest and the creature most toxic to the nest?

Randy Thornhorn

When you take pictures of nature with passion, nature poses for you more passionately!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.

Barry López

I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can’t be given.

Lois McMaster Bujold

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Edward Witten

There are certain natures of which the mutual influence is such, that the more they say, the more they have to say. For these out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion, amalgamation.

Charlotte Brontë

Nana always said the rain was Nature's way of adding sparkle to the outdoors.

Evangeline Duran Fuentes

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.

John Wallis

This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.

Peter Sloterdijk

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

Daniel J. Rice

Our natures own predilections and antipathies alike strange. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.

Charlotte Brontë

Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden.

Heather Paxson

I know that certain minds would regard as audacious the idea of relating the laws which preside over the play of our organs to those laws which govern inanimate bodies; but, although novel, this truth is none the less incontestable. To hold that the phenomena of life are entirely distinct from the general phenomena of nature is to commit a grave error, it is to oppose the continued progress of science.

François Magendie

Knowledge of Nature is an account at bank, where each dividend is added to the principal and the interest is ever compounded; and hence it is that human progress, founded on natural knowledge, advances with ever increasing speed.

Grove Karl Gilbert

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.

Charles Eisenstein

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature.

Terry Eagleton

...Everything that’s not asexual has two sexes, male and female. Most of the time it takes one of each to reproduce. Then there’s the whiptail lizard. This is a lizard that lives way the fuck out there in the middle of the desert, and sometimes it’s hard to find another lizard to mate with out there. Therefore, what the female whiptail can do is sort of make her eggs start dividing on their own. She makes daughters, clones of herself. It’s called parthenogenesis.

Erin O'Riordan

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production?

Arundhati Roy

If working-hours were natural, then employed men would only get erections between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. … during the week.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

Jon Krakauer

Nature never rushes, yet everything gets done.

Donald L. Hicks

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead.

Álvaro de Campos

The heart is natures most immense untapped resource. Utilising the power of the heart is the most significant choice you will make in life.

Steven Redhead

Gazing around, looking up at the lofty pinnacles above, which seemed to pierce the sky, looking down upon the world,--it seemed the whole world, so limitless it stretched away at her feet,--feeling that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to Heaven, remoteness from earth which comes only on mountain heights, she drew in a long breath of delight, and cried: "At last! at last, Alessandro! Here we are safe! This is freedom! This is joy!

Helen Hunt Jackson

I am a baby, I am a child, I am the innocent wonder in my eyes I am a glimpse, I am a sign, of someone I can be, someone I might I am not one, I am not two, but I am a million things entwined I am a piece, I am a slice, strung together by the yarns of time.

Sanober Khan

When in 1863 Thomas Huxley coined the phrase 'Man's Place in Nature,' it was to name a short collection of his essays applying to man Darwin's theory of evolution. The Origin of Species had been published only four years before, and the thesis that man was literally a part of nature, rather than an earthy vessel charged with some sublimer stuff, was so novel and so offensive to current metaphysics that it needed the most vigorous defense. Half the civilized world was rudely shocked, the other half skeptically amused.Nearly a century has passed since the Origin shattered the complacency of the Victorian world and initiated what may be called the Darwinian revolution, an upheaval of man's ideas comparable to and probably exceeding in significance the revolution that issued from Copernicus's demonstration that the earth moves around the sun. The theory of evolution was but one of many factors contributing to the destruction of the ancient beliefs; it only toppled over what had already been weakened by centuries of decay, rendered suspect by the assaults of many intellectual disciplines; but it marked the beginning of the end of the era of faith.

Homer W. Smith

I believe in living healthily and sustainably, and looking to nature for renewal and inspiration.

Jay Woodman

I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late

Steven Magee

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teaching, and most of these teaching have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas and most of these dogmas have been false.All stories about gods and devils, of heavens and hells, as they do not conform to nature, and are not apparent to sense, should be rejected without consideration. Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist.Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those imposters who pretend to lead by a light above nature.The lips of the dead are closed forever. There comes no voice from the tomb. Christianity is responsible for having cast the fable of eternal fire over almost every grave.

Gratis P. Spencer

Where would the end be? Will the idea—the definition—of perfection stay the same? No. Perfection is too fickle. It’s in our nature to never be satisfied. We always think we can do more.

J.D. Brewer

Nobody sane loves working in an office, It’s against human nature to be locked up in a cubicle all day long.

Peter Clines

Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.

Galen Cranz

Don't be carried away by beauty, for the faeces also stays in the rectum of ravishing faces, and their private life is not beautiful as their public life...fear beauty!

Michael Bassey Johnson

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

Herman Melville

Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.

James Hervey Johnson

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.

Democritus

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.I’m a mystic, but only in my body,My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

Alberto Caeiro

Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).

Zeena Schreck

God doesn't create imitations, so He designed you naturally. It’s ungratefulness to dream of putting on unnatural self. You have no right to fake God’s design!

Israelmore Ayivor

By nature men are uncontrollable and wild, and it should be, but women have the key to control them, if they know how to use it.

Debasish Mridha

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

On every travel, we saw beautiful landscapes.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We can all produce good fruits with fertile soil.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

Rebecca McNutt

Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

Álvaro de Campos

With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature,” Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. “I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren’t many of them left these days but they’re still very dangerous! They’re here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don’t understand the world of Representations.

Rebecca McNutt

But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each other, fell on her ear, her eyes sought the sky, and she heard a voice saying, "Majella!

Helen Hunt Jackson

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

Rebecca McNutt

If you were destined to be a poet, then you won't brainstorm for lines that rhymes. If you were destined to be a celebrity, then you shouldn't start searching for fans. If you are truly a god, then let others worship you!

Michael Bassey Johnson

At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.

Thomas Henry Huxley

1 2 3 … 5 Next

Nature Quotes

Related Topics