Nature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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.

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the fundamental "I am," which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to itself "I shall be," which goes beyond experience. The question is not, therefore, "May we believe what goes beyond experience?" for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but "How far and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming our beliefs?"

William Kingdon Clifford

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Wallace Stevens

All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.

Wilhelm Dilthey

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

Custom that is before all law, Nature that is above all art.

All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible.

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

I am one of those people who are blessed, or cursed, with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.

Margery Allingham

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

Jacques Lipchitz

All things are artificial, for nature is the Art of God.

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.

Thorstein Veblen

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

I strive to express the spiritual nature of the Universe. Painting for me is a dynamic balance and wholeness of life; it is mysterious and transcending, yet solid and real.

Richard Pousette-Dart

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.

William S. Burroughs

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

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

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

The German landscape is something unique that we cannot disturb and have no right to destroy. The more densely populated our 'living space' becomes with settlements, the greater our hunger will grow for unspoilt nature. The ever increasing spiritual damage caused by life within the big city will make this hunger practically uncontrollable... when we build here on this the landscape of our homeland we must be clear that we will protect its beauty; and in places where this beauty has already disappeared, we will reconstruct it.

The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The laws of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.