Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

Best Quotes about Nature

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

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 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

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

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

Bailey, Philip James

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

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

Tennessee Williams

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

Hugo, Victor

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

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Nature is not human hearted.

Lao-Tzu

14.

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

15.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

France, Anatole

16.

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.

17.

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

Stern, Gil

18.

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

19.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

Keillor, Garrison

24.

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Ballou, Hosea

27.

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

28.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

29.

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

30.

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Bernoulli

31.

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

Sontag, Susan

32.

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

Mackay, Eric

33.

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

Burbank, Luther

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Kalan

38.

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

39.

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

Carswell, James

40.

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

41.

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

Bacon, Francis

42.

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

Einstein, Albert

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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