“Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world.... Nature does not act by purposes.”

Mind and Matter (1958)

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Erwin Schrödinger67

Austrian physicist 1887–1961

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

1940s, The Question – What is your Hope' (c. 1940s)

“It were Happy if we studied Nature more in natural Things; and acted according to Nature; whose rules are few, plain and most reasonable.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

9
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

“The mistake made by all previous systems of ethics has been the failure to recognize that life as such is the mysterious value with which they have to deal. All spiritual life meets us within natural life. Reverence for life, therefore, is applied to natural life and spiritual life alike. In the parable of Jesus, the shepherd saves not merely the soul of the lost sheep but the whole animal. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows also that for spiritual life.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 264

“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 1 “Explaining the Very Improbable” (p. 5)

“It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen

“Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act V, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room (1922), Ch. 8
Context: The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

“Man reacts upon and toward the external universe in three ways, namely, by his active nature; by his intellectual nature; by his moral nature — that is, he acts upon it, thinks about it, and feels toward it.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

Source: Man's Moral Nature (1879), Ch. 1 : Lines of Cleavage

“Never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of Impression. Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a life of it's own, & that we are all one Life.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to William Sotheby (10 September 1802)
Letters

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Alle zweckmäßigen Lebenserscheinungen wie ihre Zweckmäßigkeit überhaupt sind letzten Endes zweckmäßig nicht für das Leben, sondern für den Ausdruck seines Wesens, für die Darstellung seiner Bedeutung.
The Task of the Translator (1920)

“Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world.... Nature does not act by purposes.”

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Erwin Schrödinger67

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