Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

Best Quotes about Nature

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

Jane Austen

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

Diderot, Denis

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

France, Anatole

No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.

Powys, Llewelyn

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

Einstein, Albert

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

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.

Carson, Rachel

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

Heisenberg

10.

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

11.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Einstein, Albert

12.

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

13.

Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.

Stern, Gil

14.

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

Molescholte

15.

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience finds in nature the correspondence through which we may know our boundless selves.

Raine, Kathleen

16.

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

17.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Blake, William

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

22.

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

23.

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

Tennessee Williams

24.

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

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

25.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

H. G. Wells

28.

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

Carswell, James

29.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

31.

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

Vico, Giambattista

32.

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

Marx, Karl

33.

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.

34.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

37.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Aristotle

38.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.

Keillor, Garrison

39.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Kalan

41.

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

Bacon, Francis

42.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip's bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat's back I do fly After summer merrily. Merrily, merrily shall I live now Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

William Shakespeare

43.

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

Hugo, Victor

44.

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor our precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature.

Law, William

45.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

Meynell, Alice

46.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Sontag, Susan

47.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Twain, Mark

48.

The environment is everything that isn't me.