116 quotes about Nature

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

I am at two with nature.

Allen, Woody

Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.

Anderson, Lorraine

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

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

All men by nature desire to know.

Aristotle

Nature does nothing uselessly.

Aristotle

To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

Austen, Jane

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

Bacon, Francis

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

Bacon, Francis

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

Bailey, Philip James

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Ballou, Hosea

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, Let there be light, constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse.

Barton, Bruce

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Baudelaire, Charles

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

Bernoulli

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

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

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

Nature is the art of God.

Browne, Sir Thomas

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

Browne, Sir Thomas

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.

Buck, Pearl S.

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

Burbank, Luther

As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.

Byron, Lord

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

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

And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.

Carroll, Lewis

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

Carson, Rachel

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

Carswell, James

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Carver, George Washington

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.

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

Cowper, William

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

Darwin, Charles

Nature, like us is sometimes caught without her diadem.

Dickinson, Emily

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

Dyke, Henry Van

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

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

The environment is everything that isn't me.

Einstein, Albert

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

A man is related to all nature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Nature... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Feynman, Richard P.

All nature wears one universal grin.

Fielding, Henry

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

France, Anatole

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

Frank, Anne

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

Fuller, Margaret

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Fuseli, Henry

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Gibran, Kahlil

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes. By the deep sea, and music in its roars; I love not man the less, but nature more.

Gordon, George

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

Havhamess, Alan

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.

Hedge, Francis Herbert

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

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

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.

Horace

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

Hugo, Victor

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.

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

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

Keillor, Garrison

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 uses as little as possible of anything.

Kepler, Johannes

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

Klee, Paul

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Krutch, Joseph Wood

Nature is not human hearted.

Lao-Tzu

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

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.

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

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

Mackay, Eric

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

Meynell, Alice

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

Molescholte

Let Nature have her way; she understands her business better than we do.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Muir, John

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

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Parton, Dolly

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

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Pirandello, Luigi

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Pope, Alexander

No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.

Powys, Llewelyn

Nature surpasses nurture.

Proverb

Nature breaks through the eyes of the cat.

Proverb, Irish

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience finds in nature the correspondence through which we may know our boundless selves.

Raine, Kathleen

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

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

Ruskin, John

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

From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn, depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things; but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can alter. To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is --the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?

Schreiner, Olive

If you live according to the dictates of nature, you will never be poor; if according to the notions of man, you will never be rich.

Seneca

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

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

Socrates

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

Sontag, Susan

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

Stern, Gil

The sun will set without thy assistance.

Talmud, The

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?

Thomson, James

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

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Turgenev, Ivan

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

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

Vaneigem, Raoul

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

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

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Whitman, Walt

She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.

Wordsworth, William

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

Wordsworth, William

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

Wordsworth, William