Nature Quotes

True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Hugh Blai

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.

Cicero

You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Arthur C. Clarke

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees(II, 72)

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

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.

John Mui

Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - The great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.

W. B. Yeats

There is no place in nature for extinction.

Licretius

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Helen Keller, The Open Door (1957)

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Werner Heisenberg

Art may make a suit of clothes: but nature must produce a man.

David Hume

Knowledge and personality make doubt possible, but knowledge is also the cure of doubt; and when we get a full and adequate sense of personality we are lifted into a region where doubt is almost impossible, for no man can know himself as he is, and all fullness of his nature, without also knowing God.

T. T. Munge

Nature is wont to hide herself.

Heraclitus, On the Universe

People are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Thomas Huxley

Equation 1. 2 - 9 is a second order, nonlinear, vector, differential equation which has defied solution in its present form. It is here therefore we depart from the realities of nature to make some simplifying assumptions...

Bate, Mueller & White, 1971, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics".

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Jean - Jacques Rousseau

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Sir Francis Bacon

Where there is joy there is creation. Where there is no joy there is no creation know the nature of joy.

Maitri Upanishads

Nature does not loathe virtue it is unaware of its existence.

Franoise Mallet - Joris

Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

Thomas Paine

All art is but imitation of nature.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.

Anatole France

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

Aristotle

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality.... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana

When a miracle happens, even if not to you, its nature is to naturally expand. You can almost feel the warmth on your face.

Hugh Elliott

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

Ah, what shall I be at fifty, should nature keep me alive, if I find the world so bitter when I am but twenty - Five?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

Denis Diderot

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse upon the First Ten Books of Livy

While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, He who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion Let nature take its course. By letting each thing act in accordance with its own nature, everything that needs to be done gets done.

Lao Tzu

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.

William James

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

A. J. Toynbee