Nature Quotes
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't change human nature from intelligent self-interest into pure idealism—not in this life; and if you could, what would be left for paradise?
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Nature intends all men and women to be mental and spiritual giants, and does not intend that any one should follow the will of another.
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The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest.
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I think that what I do is a form of pathetic fallacy, the literary trope in which nature is in sympathy with the mood of the story. I connect the physical setting and props in the story to the emotional state of the characters.
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I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.
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Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
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There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.
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Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy-that he live in accordance with his own nature.
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All of nature is God's art.
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Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
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Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
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Nature is, and must be the fountain which alone is inexhaustible; and from which all excellencies must originally flow.
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Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
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Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
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Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
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I think we're all greedy. Who do you know who says, 'I have enough! I don't need any more!'? It's part of human nature.
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This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.
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Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
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Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature.
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Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science.
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The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind.
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It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides.
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Nature is the best and really the only real vocabulary that an artist can legitimately work with.
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Where the trees thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked up by the horses' hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love that smell, -- it brings before me the entire benevolence of Nature, for ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works.
