Nature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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 seek acquaintance with Nature to know her moods and manners.

Henry David Thoreau

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.

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

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.

This mental activity, at first involuntary under the pressure of illness and suffering, gradually became second nature and led me finally to recognize that I was but an automaton devoid of free will in thought and action and merely responsible to the forces of the environment. Our bodies are of such complexity of structure, the motions we perform are so numerous and involved and the external impressions on our sense organs to such a degree delicate and elusive, that it is hard for the average person to grasp this fact. Yet nothing is more convincing to the trained investigator than the mechanistic theory of life which had been, in a measure, understood and propounded by Descartes three hundred years ago.

You who speculate on the nature of things, I praise you not for knowing the processes which nature ordinarily effects of herself, but rejoice if so be that you know the issue of such things as your mind conceives.

Leonardo da Vinci

So, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.

William Shakespeare

If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood an a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not "ant-made." Just so, for us, nature is all that is not man-made; the natural state of anything is its state when not modified by man.

Beware of sudden change, in any great point of diet, and, if necessity inforce it, fit the rest to it. For it is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things, than one.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

I hate museums - there is nothing so weighs upon my spirits. They are the catacombs of nature.... They are dead nature collected by dead men. I know not whether I muse most - at the bodies stuffed with cotton and sawdust - or those stuffed with bowels and fleshy fibre outside the cases.

Henry David Thoreau

The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the primary way in which the sensory receptacle of the brain may more fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature, and the ear is the second, gaining nobility through the recounting of things which the eye has seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature eludes calculation. Number is a grim pullulation. Nature is the thing that cannot be numbered.

What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

William Shakespeare

If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry - all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth.

Henry David Thoreau

The interpreter of the wonders of nature is experience. It never misleads us, only our grasp can do it with us. Until we can establish a general rule, we must accept the help of experience. Although nature begins with the cause, and with the experiment, we must do it inversely, we must discover the cause with experiments.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is nothing grand or noble in having the use of a slave, in so far as he is a slave; or in issuing commands about necessary things. But it is an error to suppose that every sort of rule is despotic like that of a master over slaves, for there is as great a difference between the rule over freemen and the rule over slaves as there is between slavery by nature and freedom by nature..

What do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents... The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society... Every one, by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which, in the hands of the canaille [the masses] of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.

Thomas Jefferson

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near Head Quarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favoured by the Muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, etc.

George Washington

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson