Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

- Maugham, W. Somerset

Best Quotes about Nature

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

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

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

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

Mackay, Eric

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

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

10.

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

Hedge, Francis Herbert

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

Diderot, Denis

20.

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

Bailey, Philip James

21.

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

Buffett, Warren

22.

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

23.

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

Kalan

24.

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

25.

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

Keillor, Garrison

26.

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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

Carson, Rachel

30.

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

Miller, Henry

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Nature breaks through the eyes of the cat.

Proverb, Irish

35.

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.

36.

Nature surpasses nurture.

Proverb

37.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Krutch, Joseph Wood

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

44.

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

Havhamess, Alan

45.

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

46.

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