Nature Quotes

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song; and the sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves and should turn them into odes of self congratulation on the excellence of the human mind.

Alfred North Whitehead

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

William Ellery Channing

A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Joseph Addison

Engineering is the art of organizing and directing men and controlling the forces and materials of nature for the benefit of the human race.

Henry G. Stott, 1907

Different people have different duties assigned to them by Nature Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, and the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.

Henrik Ibsen

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

John Updike

I will go further, and assert that nature without culture can often do more to deserve praise than culture without nature.

Cicero

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man.

Nikita Khrushchev

Every investigation which is guided by principles of Nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach.

Athenus

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

Plato, The Republic

A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Joseph Addison

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Denis Diderot

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Alfred Tennyson

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

Herodotus, The Histories of Herodotus

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.

Jacob Brownowski

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle, Politics

You cannot hold back a good laugh any more than you can the tide. Both are forces of nature.

William Rotsle

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

Margaret Fulle

A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.

Edmund Spense

Adopt the pace of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essay: Nature

The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.

John F. Kennedy

It is the common failing of totalitarian regimes that they cannot really understand the nature of our democracy. They mistake dissent for disloyalty. They mistake restlessness for a rejection of policy. They mistake a few committees for a country. They misjudge individual speeches for public policy. Answering North Vietnamese charge that US could not endure.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Nature is at work.. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

David Seabury

To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.

Seneca

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels (1613)

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.

Sterne

If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Everything is deemed possible except that which is impossible in the nature of things.

California Civil Code, "Object of a Contract".

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

Alan Bleasdale

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Albert Einstein

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, therefore guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue, and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - Instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.

Dale Carnegie

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

Aristotle, Parts of Animals