Quotes about nature
page 16

“Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair and let us huddle together as darkness takes over. We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are children of nature.”

Susan Polis Schutz (1944) American poet

Children, Home, Flowers, Bird

“My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Fear

“People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome.”

Thornton Wilder Our Town

"Mrs. Gibbs"
Source: Our Town (1938)

Life, People

“Don't you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly.”

Sogyal Rinpoche (1947–2019) Tibetan Dzogchen lama of the Nyingma tradition

Change

“There was a time when people accepted magical experiences as natural. There were no priests then, and no one went chasing after the secrets of the occult.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

People, Secret, Time

“Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Walter Brueggemann (1933) American theologian

Hurt

“The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Men

“Yeah, well. I don’t try to be awesome. It just comes natural.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Death, God, Thinking, Night

“My mother says looking is the nature of wisdom.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Wisdom

“… his face bore an expression that mingled haughty disdain with a tender, ardent sympathy, as if he would love all things if only his nature could let him forget their defects.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Love, Forgetting

“This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Hate, Learning

“This place is too calm, too natural--too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Idea

“Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

Source: The Temple of My Familiar

People, Understanding

“It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Life, Death, Parting

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

Appearance

“All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Source: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

Secret

“Look at Matsumoto. You need at least 10 years of sleep to catch up with her." "Shut up! Rangiku's a freak of nature!”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: Bleach, Volume 24

Sleep

“Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

Source: The Lords of Discipline

Happiness, Beauty, Happy

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

John Muir book Our National Parks

The Cruise of the Corwin http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/cruise_of_the_corwin/default.aspx (1917), chapter 3: Siberian Adventures  (Echoing William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.") 1910s Variant: One touch of nature makes all the world kin. Source: Our National Parks

World, Beauty, Peaceful

“Winter is nature's way of saying, "Up yours.”

Robert Byrne (1928–2013) American chess player and writer

Way, Winter

“I'm scared," he says.
"I know," says the nurse.
"I want you all to go to Hell."
"That's natural.”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Hell

“Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty - with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.”

David Levithan book Every You, Every Me

Source: Every You, Every Me

“I am not loved. I am not a beautiful soul. I am not a good-natured, giving person. I am not anybody's savior.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Love, Beauty, Soul, Personality

“Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. … The petty discomforts that beset the awkward guest, the unskilled camper, are quickly forgotten, while all that is precious remains. Fears vanish as soon as one is fairly free in the wilderness.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" The Yellowstone National Park http://books.google.com/books?id=smQCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA509", The Atlantic Monthly, volume LXXXI, number 486 (April 1898) pages 509-522 (at pages 515-516); modified slightly and reprinted in Our National Parks http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/our_national_parks/ (1901), chapter 2: The Yellowstone National Park 1900s, Our National Parks (1901)

Age, Fear, Peace, Mountain

“When you show yourself to the world and display your talents, you naturally stir all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity… you cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Life, World, Feeling, Envy

“We can all begin freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Love, Heart

“Miles is… Miles; close to a force of nature, climbing up out of his own pages and escaping subordination to any opinion of mine.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

“One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet

Source: A Study in Scarlet

Idea

“But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Way, Selfishness

“When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

World

“Anna spoke not only naturally and intelligently, but intelligently and casually, without attaching any value to her own thoughts, yet giving great value to the thoughts of the one she was talking to.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Intelligence

“When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

Source: Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

God, Reality

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

“Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim.”

Robert J. Sawyer book Flashforward

Source: Flashforward

“The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

Love, Truth

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World

Love, Business

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

Universe

“It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

First Visit to Armenia (1935)

Question, Study, Learning

“They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

“Wolves are disciplined not only when they hunt but also when they travel, when they play, and when they eat. Nature doesn't view discipline as a negative thing. Discipline is DNA. Discipline is survival.”

Cesar Millan (1969) Mexican - American dog trainer and television personality

Source: Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems

Travel

“Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Passion

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 159
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Lovers, Solitude, Suffering

“Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Source: The Woman Destroyed

“I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Dreams, Thinking

“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

Way, Soul, Optimism, Falseness

“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Women, Understanding, Thinking

“I'm fine with Nature's way, as long as Nature keeps it out of *my* way.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Way

“If, for example, you are miserly by nature, you will never go beyond a certain limit; only generous souls attain greatness.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

Soul

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock."
- Frankenstein p115”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Knowledge

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“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 roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Love, Pleasure, Music, Sea

“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Way, Idea, Thinking

“A way of life that keeps saying 'Around the next corner, above the next step,' works against the natural order of things and makes it so difficult to be happy and good.”

Benjamin Hoff book The Tao of Pooh

Source: The Tao of Pooh

Life, Happiness, Way

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Beyond the Black River" (1935)

“We must never forget that we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.”

Alan Harrington (1933–2019) Welsh footballer

Forgetting

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Life, World, Beauty

“Only in our darkest hour do we find the light. Humans are destructive by nature. The world is lacking balance. Terrors are beginning to triumph over the simple joys. Stand back and watch, because you're going to be here when we fall.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (1984) Novelist

World, Light, Joy

“What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Draft of a German reply to a letter sent to him in 1954 or 1955, p. 39
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)
Context: I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.

Feeling, Thinking, Personality

“The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Source: The Essays: A Selection

Exercises

“Nature had squandered an unreasonable quantity of male beauty on this undeserving creature.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Devil in Winter

Beauty

“If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Life, Death, Thinking

“She was by nature a sunny soul”

Jean Webster book Daddy-Long-Legs

Source: Daddy-Long-Legs

Soul

“You don’t need to control emotion,” he said. “Emotions are natural, like passing weather. Sometimes it’s fear, sometimes sorrow or anger. Emotions are not the problem. The key is to transform the energy of emotion into constructive action.”

Dan Millman book Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Source: Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Fear, Problem, Weather, Anger

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Beauty, Art, Success

“Give me solitude — give me Nature — give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities!”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Leaves of Grass

Solitude

“I find it rather easy to portray a businessman. Being bland, rather cruel and incompetent comes naturally to me.”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

“Unpleasant?" he finished for her.
"Only on the days when my adoptive mother tosses me out of the house with instructions never to darken her door again. Usually, I'm remarkably good-natured. Try me on any day that doesn't end in y.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Housing

“It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde. Le livre de mon ami http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Livre_de_Pierre_-_Premi%C3%A8res_conqu%C3%AAtes#II._La_Dame_en_blanc (1885): Le livre de Pierre, part I, ch. II: La dame en blanc

Fashion, Thinking

“The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Color, Flowers

“A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.”

Diana Wynne Jones book Castle in the Air

Source: Castle in the Air

“When you nurture Nature, Nature nurtures you.”

Donald L. Hicks

Look into the stillness

“We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Source: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Variant: Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”

William James book The Varieties of Religious Experience

Source: The Varieties of Religious Experience

Smile

“Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

“Nature hates calculators.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Hate

“There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and woman to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers & Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Men, Dogs, Way, Sister

“I never use the words HUMANIST or HUMANITARIAN, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, from Yosemite Valley (7 October 1874); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 11: On Widening Currents 1870s Source: Wilderness Essays

People