“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author
Obedir a Natura in tutto è il meglio.
Canzone 361, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death
“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist
Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)
Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist
Science and the Unseen World (1929)
Context: If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised.... this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.<!--III, p.30
“For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature.”
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer
The Growth of Love, Sonnet 8.
Poetry
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor
RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911
Camille Paglia (1947) American writer
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 85