Quotes about nature
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“He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.”

Eric Metaxas (1963) American journalist

Source: Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery

“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island

Intelligence

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

Way, Passion, Forgetting

“We sit to express our true nature”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

“It's simply human nature to have an occasional, fleeting interest in someone whom you once loved.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Love the One You're With

Love

“One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.”

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

1872(?), page 95
John of the Mountains, 1938

Books, Soul, Mountain

“I was scared of one thing after another. I still am.
Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless or you can be free, you can’t be both.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Source: Here Is Where We Meet: A Story of Crossing Paths

“If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Young Goodman Brown

Source: "Young Goodman Brown"
Context: "Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race."

Dreams, Hope, Evil, Heart

“Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Levels of Life

Pain, Way, Thinking, Hurt

“What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

Thinking

“It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation

Source: Foundation

Disappointment, Feeling

“Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Tree, Time

“Hope is a force of nature. Don't let anyone tell you different.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

Hope

“My hair is naturally blonde… Just for the record. ~ Jace”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Books

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased.”

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

Variant: That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.

Change

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

Love, God, Universe

“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

Stupidity, Knowledge

“The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.”

Hunter S. Thompson book The Curse of Lono

Source: The Curse of Lono

Soul, Passion

“Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

...in der ganzen Natur, mit dem Grad der Intelligenz die Fähigkeit zum Schmerze sich steigert, also ebenfalls erst hier ihre höchste Stufe erreicht.
The Wisdom of Life. Chapter II. Personality, or What a Man Is: Footnote 19
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Not yet placed by volume, chapter or section

Pain, Intelligence, Suffering

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

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

Color, Beauty, Peaceful

“… it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Source: Scaramouche

“A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Lie, Hope, Silence, Parting

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Women, Children, Home, Intelligence

“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Book 3, Chapter 16
Source: Scaramouche

School, Sincerity

“Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.”

Jeanette Winterson book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

Source: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.”

Robin McKinley book Spindle's End

Source: Spindle's End

People, Way, Forgetting

“You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

World, Reality

“The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Thinking

“By nature of definition only the coward is capable of the highest heroism.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 4

“You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Love, World, Childhood

“You can't change laws without first changing human nature.'
-Nurse Greta

You can't change human nature without first changing the law.'
-Nurse Yvonne”

Neal Shusterman book Unwind

Source: Unwind

Law, Change

“The nature of this flower is to bloom.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Flowers, For Mother, For Friend

“A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Henry David Thoreau book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Beauty

“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet

Source: A Study in Scarlet

Life

“Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

People, Way

“Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,
In ruin and confusion hurled,
He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,
And stand secure amidst a falling world.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Translation of Horace, Odes, Book III, ode iii.

World

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.”

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) English composer, conductor, and pianist

Love, Pain, Beauty, Music

“I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Imagination, Tree, Painting

“Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

God, Art, Feeling, Loss

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Sense, Beauty, Peaceful

“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Source: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Dreams, Mood

“Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Feeling, Flowers

“Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.”

Jürgen Moltmann (1926) German Reformed theologian

World

“Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.”

Ina May Gaskin (1940) American midwife

Source: Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

Problem, Maternity

“Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.”

Twyla Tharp (1941) American choreographer

Source: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

Reading

“And truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and wish to do it anyway, here lies the error and the blame.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Men, Error

“I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Source: Listen, Little Man!

Love, God, Thinking

“Crazy Curran ranked right up there with monsoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Strikes

“Now Bella, you know Jacob adores you. He naturally wants to protect you. He literally worships the ground you walk on."

"Ha ha," Bella said dryly. "Earth demon. Worship the ground. Cute. Really cute.”

Jacquelyn Frank (1968) writer

Source: Gideon

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”

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

The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 15: Hetch Hetchy Valley  1910s Context: These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

God, Mountain, Perfection

“What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.”

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer

“What's the point of God making us human if He doesn't want us to act like we're human?'
'To see if we can rise above our natures,'Megan said.”

Susan Beth Pfeffer book Life As We Knew It

Source: Life As We Knew It

God

“All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2010: Odyssey Two

Source: 2010: Odyssey Two

Fate, Universe

“Our belief is often strongest when it should be weakest. That is the nature of hope.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Hope

“Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dyin’s as natural as livin’; man who’s afraid to die is too afraid to live, far as I’ve ever seen. So there’s nothing to do but forget it, that’s all. Seems to me”

Anthony Summers (1942) writer

Source: Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

Forgetting

“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

“I am crying over the elusive nature of love.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Love, Cry

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"The Christian Religion" The North American Review, August 1881 http://books.google.com/books?id=OPmfAAAAMAAJ&q=%22There+are+in+nature+neither+rewards+nor+punishments+there+are+consequences%22&pg=PA14#v=onepage http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=nora&cc=nora&view=image&seq=121&idno=nora0133-2 Variants: We must remember that in nature there are neither rewards nor punishments there are consequences. The life and death of Christ do not constitute an atonement. They are worth the example, the moral force, the heroism of benevolence, and in so far as the life of Christ produces emulation in the direction of goodness, it has been of value to mankind. As published in Some Reasons Why (1895) http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/some_reasons_why.html In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences. Letters and Essays, 3rd Series. Some Reasons Why, viii. Source: The Christian Religion An Enquiry Context: There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences. The life of Christ is worth its example, its moral force, its heroism of benevolence.

“The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Gen. Edward Cummings, in Pt. 1, Ch. 6
Source: The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“He treated Root exactly as he treated prime numbers. For him, primes were the base on which all other natural numbers relied; and children were the foundation of everything worthwhile in the adult world”

Yōko Ogawa book The Housekeeper and the Professor

Source: The Housekeeper and the Professor

Children, World

“The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Love, Fear, Angels

“In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

Source: My Autobiography

“But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Love, Soul, Sun

“understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

People, Forgiveness, Understanding, Decision

“For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Law, Confidence

“The more you try to crush your true nature, the more it will control you. Be what you are. No one who really loves you will stop.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Love

“Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“People hide their truest nature. I understood that; I even applauded it. What sort of world would it be if people bled all over the sidewalks, if they wept under trees, smacked whomever they despised, kissed strangers, revealed themselves?”

Alice Hoffman book The Ice Queen

Source: The Ice Queen

People, World, Kiss, Tree

“In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

Henry Adams book The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Source: The Education of Henry Adams

Law, Dreams

“The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

“A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books…. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Women, Men, Books, History

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will (1929)
Source: Do What You Will: Twelve Essays
Context: Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

Life, People, Dead