Natural Quotes

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We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Mankind is divided into two classes: those who, being artificial, praise nature, and those who, being natural, praise art.

Bertrand Russell

Indeed, women rather take to terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates, highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has a natural instinct to saddle your lion.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A life which goes excessively against natural impulse is... likely to involve effects of strain that may be quite as bad as indulgence in forbidden impulses would have been. People who live a life which is unnatural beyond a point are likely to be filled with envy, malice and uncharitableness.

Bertrand Russell

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

Whoever is to acquire a competent knowledge of medicine, ought to be possessed of the following advantages: a natural disposition; instructionl a favorable place for the study; early tuition, love of labor; leisure.

I am a Muslim and... my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds and his conscious behavior. And it teaches me to be for the rights of all human beings, but especially the Afro-American human being, because my religion is a natural religion, and the first law of nature is self-preservation.

If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you, and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition.

I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection (the title of my book), which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?

Henry David Thoreau

In Philosophy, the contemplations of man do either penetrate unto God, or are circumferred to Nature, or are reflected and reverted upon himself. Out of which several inquiries there do arise three knowledges, Divine Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, and Human Philosophy or Humanity. For all things are marked and stamped with this triple character of the power of God, the difference of Nature and the use of Man.

Lastly, isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species. If, however, an isolated area be very small, either from being surrounded by barriers, or from having very peculiar physical conditions, the total number of the individuals supported on it will necessarily be very small; and fewness of individuals will greatly retard the production of new species through natural selection, by decreasing the chance of the appearance of favourable variations.

The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.

Thomas Jefferson

The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Though the profusion of Government must undoubtedly have retarded the natural progress of England to wealth and improvement, it has not been able to stop it.

I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.

When men die of disease they are said to die from
natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do)
the doctor gets the credit of curing them.

George Bernard Shaw

Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.

Albert Einstein

In every study of nature there can be only so much genuine science as there is a priori knowledge, by the same token, natural philosophy will contain genuine science only to the extent in which mathematics can be applied to it.

Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang.

Winston Churchill

There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal...

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.