Motivational Quotes

Nature

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.

- Carswell, James

Best Quotes about Nature

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

Addison, Joseph

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

Hoffer, Eric

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

Shaw, George Bernard

If winds are the spirit of the sky's ocean, the clouds are the texture. Their is easily the most uninhibited dominion of the earth. Nothing in physical shape is too fantastic for them. They can be round as apples or as fine as string, as dense as a jungle, as wispy as a whiff of down, as mild as puddle water or as potent as the belch of a volcano. Some are thunderous anvils formed by violent up drafts from the warm earth. Some are ragged coattails of storms that have passed. Some are stagnant blankets of warm air resting on cold. I have seen clouds in the dawn that looked like a pink Sultan with his pale harem maidens and a yellow slob of eunuch lolling impotent in the background.

Murchie, Guy

If you live according to the dictates of nature, you will never be poor; if according to the notions of man, you will never be rich.

Seneca

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

Vaneigem, Raoul

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

Camus, Albert

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

11.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.

Horace

12.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

Vico, Giambattista

13.

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.

Carswell, James

14.

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Socrates

15.

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

Picabia, Francis

16.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself --my disgust at her barbarity --clumsiness --darkness --bitter mockery of herself --is the most desolating.

Ruskin, John

18.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

Diderot, Denis

19.

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.

Sade, Marquis De

20.

Nature is a good name for an effect whose cause is God.

Cowper, William

21.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Twain, Mark

23.

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

Shakespeare, William

24.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

Frank, Anne

25.

Nature breaks through the eyes of the cat.

Proverb, Irish

26.

Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

27.

The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature --were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

28.

I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.

Bhagavad Gita

29.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.

Angelou, Maya

30.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Hugo, Victor

32.

It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.

Scott Westerfeld

33.

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

Havhamess, Alan

34.

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

Bronowski, Jacob

35.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

Heraclitus

36.

That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.

Child, Lydia M.

37.

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't --it's human.

Erasmus, Desiderius

38.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Woolf, Virginia

39.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Ballou, Hosea

40.

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

Molescholte

41.

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.

Hedge, Francis Herbert

42.

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

Dylan, Bob

43.

Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

Dyke, Henry Van

44.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

James, P. D.

45.

Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Nature does require her times of preservation.

William Shakespeare

47.

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that Icannot think of heaven and the angels.

Buck, Pearl S.

48.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

Einstein, Albert

49.

The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health.

Ann Radcliffe

50.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Tennessee Williams