
“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”
Obedir a Natura in tutto è il meglio.
Canzone 361, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death
Obbedire a natura in tutto è il meglio.
Variant: Obedir a Natura in tutto è il meglio.
“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”
Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)
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.”
The Growth of Love, Sonnet 8.
Poetry
RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911
Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 85