Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

Best Quotes about Nature

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

Molescholte

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

Miller, Henry

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

Vico, Giambattista

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

Scott Westerfeld

Nature is not human hearted.

Lao-Tzu

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

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

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

Tennessee Williams

10.

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

Woolf, Virginia

11.

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Kepler, Johannes

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Stern, Gil

15.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Sontag, Susan

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

23.

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

Bacon, Francis

24.

Hoffer, Eric

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Keillor, Garrison

29.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

Ruskin, John

30.

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

Kalan

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Carswell, James

34.

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

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

35.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

36.

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.

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.

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

Buffett, Warren

39.

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.

Twain, Mark

40.

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

Meynell, Alice

41.

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

42.

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

Mackay, Eric

43.

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.

Walt Whitman

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

47.

Nature does require her times of preservation.

William Shakespeare

48.

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

H. G. Wells

49.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

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