Nature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation.

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Henry David Thoreau

But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy,
Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose; but Fortune, O!

William Shakespeare

Upon the gallows hung a wretch,
Too sullied for the hell
To which the law entitled him.
As nature's curtain fell
The one who bore him tottered in,
For this was woman's son.
'T was all I had, she stricken gasped;
Oh, what a livid boon!

Emily Dickinson

So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination.

In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result,but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.

Henry David Thoreau

When we see an effect happen always in the same manner, we infer that it takes place by a natural necessity; as, for instance, that the sun will rise to morrow; but nature often deceives us, and will not submit to its own rules.

For the most part, I do the thing which my own nature prompts me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it.

Albert Einstein

Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.

Albert Einstein

Money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more.

Benjamin Franklin

THEODOTUS: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
BRITANNUS (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper.
THEODOTUS (outraged): How!
CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, that imagines also, and perceives. Assuredly it is not little, if all these properties belong to my nature.

René Descartes

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In society you will not find health, but in nature. Unless our feet at least stood in the midst of nature, all our faces would bepale and livid. Society is always diseased, and the best is the most so.

Henry David Thoreau

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It's for the superfluous we sweat.

Seneca the Younger

Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning home and to one's former state is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new summer, each new month and new year — deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming — does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.

Leonardo da Vinci

The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.

Henry David Thoreau

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

Henry David Thoreau

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The contemplation of the architecture of the universe in the infinitely great and infinitely little of which it is composed, leads us inevitably to the conclusion that at the bottom of the whole an idea lies, according to which God in nature, and nature in God from eternity to eternity, works and shapes forth all things.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe