Nature Quotes

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Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

John Ralston Saul

God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing.

A word about the title—"Nature's Miracles." Some may claim that it is unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as "miracles." But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things—as wonderful as any miracle that was ever recorded—subservient to the rule of law. "But," you say, "a miracle does not come under any rule of law." Ah! are you sure of that? It is true that we may not understand the law that the so-called miracle comes under, but the Author of all natural law does.

Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.

Ludwig von Mises

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

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

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

Chauncey Wright

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Carl von Clausewitz

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

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little — or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Anthony Trollope

No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings.

Ellsworth Huntington

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.

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.

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

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity — "property" — confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.

Lawrence Lessig

I think most artists create out of despair.... if labor pain is for physical birth, then there is a psychic pain and spiritual for creation.... The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Nevelson

I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature.

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation—sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

Arthur Conan Doyle

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

Henry David Thoreau