Nature Quotes

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Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

Nature has granted the use of life like a loan, without fixing any day for repayment.

Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.

I seek acquaintance with Nature to know her moods and manners.

Henry David Thoreau

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it.

Henry David Thoreau

Whoever flatters himself that he can retain in his memory all the effects of Nature is deceived, for our memory is not so capacious: therefore consult Nature for everything.

Leonardo da Vinci

What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be man!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.

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

Science, whatever unpleasant consequences it may have by the way, is in its very nature a liberator, a liberator from the weight of destructive passions.

Bertrand Russell

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.

Henry David Thoreau

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.... it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human activities which lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and nature's resources result from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the earth's living things.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The culture of life means respect for nature and protection of God's work of creation. In a special way it means respect for human life from the first moment of conception until its natural end.

Pope John Paul II

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

Henry David Thoreau

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

Henry David Thoreau

Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Vincent van Gogh

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.

Henry David Thoreau

Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature. The way of nature is unchanging. Knowing constancy is insight.