Nature Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy

Mercy Otis Warren

We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

Antoine Lavoisier

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

Jacques Lipchitz

Love is a strange master, and human nature is still stranger.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

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

Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.

Henri Poincaré

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has 'invented' himself by saying 'no' to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry — which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks — that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.

I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.

There is not so variable a thing in Nature as a lady's head-dress.

It is an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond that range of cause and effect.

For me nature is not a landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces - an event rather than an appearance.

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

The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.

Otto Hermann Kahn

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.