Motivational Quotes

Nature

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

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about 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

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Ballou, Hosea

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

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Klee, Paul

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

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

10.

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that Icannot think of heaven and the angels.

Buck, Pearl S.

11.

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

12.

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

Carswell, James

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

19.

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Bernoulli

20.

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

Aristotle

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Einstein, Albert

23.

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

Ruskin, John

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

Cowper, William

27.

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

Carson, Rachel

28.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.

Angelou, Maya

29.

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.

30.

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

Keillor, Garrison

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

Kalan

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

41.

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

Vico, Giambattista

42.

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

Diderot, Denis

43.

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.

44.

Nature is not human hearted.

Lao-Tzu

45.

Nature is the art of God.

Dante Alighieri

46.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

Heraclitus

47.

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

48.

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

Hugo, Victor

49.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

50.

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.