Nature Quotes

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed.

Solomon Short

I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

John Davidson Rockefeller, Sr.

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature - - - And another woman to help him forget them.

Helen Rowland

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to.... The feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitalitythe supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Epistle Dedicatory

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

Mark Twain

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

Immanuel Kant

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.

Auguste Rodin

Many people believe they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

William Ralph Inge

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten much as we can easily destroy our puny selves.

Stephen Jay Gould

Nature abhors a vacuum. When a head lacks brains, nature fills it with conceit.

Author Unknown

We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203 - 1207.

Nature hates calculators.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

Linnaeus

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

Marilyn Monroe

As the moon retaineth her nature, though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain, so the Soul remaineth perfect even in the bosom of the fool.

Akhenaton

In the next year or so, my signature will appear on 60 billion of United States currency. More important to me, however, is the signature that appears on my life - The strong, proud, assertive handwriting of a loving father and mother.

Katherine D. Ortega

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson

To greed, all nature is insufficient. - Hercules Oetaeus.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another.

Juvenal

I am at two with nature.

Woody Allen

Many difficulties which nature throws in our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.

Titus Livius

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

Barry Lopez

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If thou live according to nature, thou wilt never be poor if according to the opinions of the world, thou wilt never be rich.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased.

Alexander Hamilton

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

Erich Fromm

Nature made him, and then broke the mold.

Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

Jane Austen, Emma

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator, July 12, 1711

Engineers participate in the activities which make the resources of nature available in a form beneficial to man and provide systems which will perform optimally and economically.

L. M. K. Boelter, 1957

Socrates called beauty a short - Lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; Aristotle, that it was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world; Homer, that it was a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid, that it was favor bestowed by the gods.

Francis Quarles

The love of nature is consolation against failure.

Berthe Morisot

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

Dietrich Bonhoeffe