Quotes about nature

page 18

“This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)”

“When we pay attention to nature's music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.”

“Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”

“Dogs are a gift to mankind. They are happy and joyful and loyal by nature. They are pure, positive energy and teach by example. That is all that's required of them.”

“He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”

“But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”

“In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.”

“The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.”

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

“Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary…”

“But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gain-said.”

“I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”

“Besides, you're a cat. It's your nature to think you're the center of the universe.”

“Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.”

“The leaves let go, the seeds let go, and I must let go sometimes, too, and cast my lot with another of nature’s imperfect but tenacious survivors.”

“I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.”

“When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.”

“She had perfect features, with her eye, nose, lips, and ears the right size and in right places. That is all it takes to make people beautiful, normal body parts – yet why does nature mess it up so many times?”

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”

“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.”

“Neither the mouse nor the boy was the least bit surprised that each could understand the other. Two creatures who shared a love for motorcycles naturally spoke the same language.”

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”

“I am at two with nature.”

“Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful… How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.”

“Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.”

“Every name is real. That's the nature of names.”

“if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another.”

“When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.”

“There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.”

“Nature is God's first missionary. Where there is no Bible there are sparkling stars. Where there are not preachers there are spring times…
If a person has nothing but nature, then nature is enough to reveal something about God.”

“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”

“Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.”

“… the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

“For a human being, nothing comes naturally,” said Grumman. “We have to learn everything we do.”

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

“Plus he was naturally lucky at cards. As Mam had always said, lucky at cards, or lucky at life. One or the other. Not both.”

“Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.”

“The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature. You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.”

“If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, understand that you'll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job.”

“After the group vet appointment--during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room--we went back to Sabrina's and re-released the cats to their natural habitat.”

“The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.”

“Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! but I have never been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine.”

“The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.”

“All change brings bad things and good things to replace the bad and good things that were before. It is natural to look back and say it was better before—but that does not make it true. Different is not worse. It is just different.”

“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.”

“Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.”
Opinionis enim commenta delet dies, naturae iudicia confirmat.

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”

“Someday you'll find someone special again. People who've been in love once usually do. It's in their nature.”

“I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness."

-Edward Ferrars”

“Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.”

“Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.”

“Our exclusive dependence on rational thought and language has obscured our natural ability to sense the flow of energy.”

“Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.”

“When you know and respect your Inner Nature, you know where you belong. You also know where you don't belong.”

“The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.”

“Everyone had a weakness. It was the law of nature that for each being there was a predator, or a disease, or a vulnerability built into their very core.”

“Haymich finally drops the good-natured act. "you know who else, Katniss. You know who stepped up first."
Of course I do.
Gale.”

“Perhaps all our troubles - all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can't overcome - began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.”

“Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.”

“Honestly, Clary, if you don't start utilizing a bit of your natural feminine superiority I just don't know what I'll do with you.”

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”

“It's taken me years of practice to learn how to act natural.”

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.”

“Is it true, O Christ in heaven, that the highest suffer the most?
That the strongest wander furthest and most hopelessly are lost?
That the mark of rank in nature is capacity for pain?
That the anguish of the singer makes the sweetness of the strain?”

“Beauty comes naturally, but it's hard to be stunning by accident.”

“Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.”

“Why is marijuana against the law? It grows naturally on our planet, serves a thousand different functions, all of them positive. To make marijuana against the law is like saying that God made a mistake. Like on the seventh day God looked down, "There it is. My Creation, perfect and holy in all ways. Now I can rest. [Gives shocked expression] Oh my Me! I left fuckin' pot everywhere. I should never have smoked that joint on the third day. Hehe, that was the day I created the possum. Still gives me a chuckle. But if I leave pot everywhere, that's gonna give people the impression they're supposed to … use it. Now I have to create Republicans."”

“The multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him… [from Macbeth]”

“Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.”

“Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.”

“Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.”

“I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural.. to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.”

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

“We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.”

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

“Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.”

“To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a "Natural Man."”

“I comfort myself with the reflection that your wife will possibly be able to curb your desire--I admit, a natural one for the most part--to exterminate your fellows.”

“Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

“Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”

“There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.”

“So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.”

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.”

“Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.”

“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.”

“Life works on strange laws of nature (Karma).
One never knows when a friend turns enemy & vice-versa.
Rely on your Self; self-reliance”

“He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.”

“Brand a man as a thief and no one will ever hire him for honest labor - he will be a hardened robber within weeks. The brand does not reveal a person's nature, it shapes it.”

“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”

“The very reason for nature's existence is for the education of the soul.”

“It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.”

“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

“Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or shay, or peris-unlike people in general-it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally.”

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

“About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil.”

“The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.”

“The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.”

“There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.”