Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Nature

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

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

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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

Cowper, William

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

Muir, John

Nature's law affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.

Burbank, Luther

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

10.

What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

11.

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

Diderot, Denis

12.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on -- have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear -- what remains? Nature remains.

Whitman, Walt

13.

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

14.

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

H. G. Wells

15.

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

Walt Whitman

16.

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

17.

Nature surpasses nurture.

Proverb

18.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Horace

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Hugo, Victor

24.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Ballou, Hosea

25.

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

26.

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

Jane Austen

27.

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

Keillor, Garrison

28.

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

29.

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

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.

Let Nature have her way; she understands her business better than we do.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

32.

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, Let there be light, constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse.

Barton, Bruce

33.

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

Woolf, Virginia

34.

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

35.

Nature does require her times of preservation.

William Shakespeare

36.

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

Bailey, Philip James

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Aristotle

40.

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.)

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Kepler, Johannes

44.

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

45.

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

Buffett, Warren

46.

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

Carver, George Washington

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

Einstein, Albert

49.

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

50.

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