Motivational Quotes

Nature

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about 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

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

We are all murderers and prostitutes --no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

Laing, R. D.

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify -- so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Keats, John

The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

Kepler, Johannes

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.

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

Aristotle

10.

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

Carson, Rachel

11.

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

12.

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

Woolf, Virginia

13.

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Pirandello, Luigi

14.

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

Diderot, Denis

15.

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

16.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes. By the deep sea, and music in its roars; I love not man the less, but nature more.

Gordon, George

17.

Nature... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Kalan

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

Hugo, Victor

29.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Buffett, Warren

30.

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Muir, John

31.

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

Tennessee Williams

32.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

33.

Art is man's nature: Nature is God's art.

Bailey, Philip James

34.

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

35.

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

36.

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

Scott Westerfeld

37.

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Bernoulli

38.

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

Stern, Gil

39.

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?

Thomson, James

40.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Carver, George Washington

41.

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

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

42.

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

Vico, Giambattista

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

H. G. Wells

45.

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

Horace

46.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Fuseli, Henry