Motivational Quotes

Nature

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Nature

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

Jane Austen

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

Hugo, Victor

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

Vico, Giambattista

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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.

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

10.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Chomsky, Noam

11.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Cowper, William

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

All men by nature desire to know.

Aristotle

18.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Kepler, Johannes

19.

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

20.

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

Sontag, Susan

21.

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

22.

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

23.

Nature does require her times of preservation.

William Shakespeare

24.

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.

25.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Havhamess, Alan

29.

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

30.

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

Klee, Paul

31.

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

32.

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

33.

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

34.

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

Elizabeth Aston

35.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Miller, Henry

41.

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

42.

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

Carson, Rachel

43.

Lightning is the shorthand of a storm, and tells of chaos.

Mackay, Eric

44.

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

45.

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

Diderot, Denis

46.

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.)

47.

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

Powys, Llewelyn

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

Molescholte