Nature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

E. F. Schumacher

One day I undertook a tour through the country, and the diversity and beauties of nature I met with in this charming season, expelled every gloomy and vexatious thought.

I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man.

Theodore Parker

There is something in the decay of nature that awakens thought, even in the most trifling mind.

Sarah Josepha Hale

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present existing.

Herbert Spencer

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.

There is something of the freshness of mind, of the lightness of spirit in Linne which for centuries has been linked in people's minds with the mountains of Sweden and Swedish joy in nature.

Johannes V. Jensen

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

.... But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.

C. Northcote Parkinson

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers.

James Clerk Maxwell

A light wind swept over the corn; and all nature laughed in the sunshine.

Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

William Wordsworth

A mere copier of nature can never produce any thing great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.

Joshua Reynolds

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston

If you will investigate all the Indian troubles, you will find that there is something wrong of this nature at the bottom of all of them, something relating to the supplies, or else a tardy and broken faith on the part of the general government.