Nature Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.

Christopher Alexander

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing...

Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences. The life of Christ is worth its example, its moral force, its heroism of benevolence.

Robert G. Ingersoll

We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet—you've not got your niche in creation.

Of lesbianism

The ideas that are basic to [my work] often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us. He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth

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

Edgar Rice Burroughs

You must try to match your colors as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on natures own hues and tints.

William Merritt Chase

Art, to me is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word 'Impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. [...] The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. They take the ready-made axioms laid down by others, and walk blindly in a rut without trying to see for themselves.

The gifts of nature are infinite in their variety, and mind differs from mind almost as much as body from body.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Benjamin Haydon

The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.

Why is it so painful to watch a person sink? Because there is something unnatural in it, for nature demands personal progress, evolution, and every backward step means wasted energy.

August Strindberg

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

I believe that if an individual is not on the path to transcending his society and seeing in what way it furthers or impedes the development of human potential, he cannot enter into intimate contact with his humanity. If the tabus, restrictions, distorted values appear "natural" to him, this is a clear indication that he cannot have a real knowledge of human nature.
I believe that society, while having a function both stimulating and inhibiting at the same time, has always been in conflict with humanity. Only when the purpose of society is identified with that of humanity will society cease to paralyze man and encourage his dominance.

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

Henry David Thoreau

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

Henry David Thoreau

The man of science, who is not seeking for expression but for a fact to be expressed merely, studies nature as a dead language. I pray for such inward experience as will make nature significant.

Henry David Thoreau

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson