Quotes about nature

page 19

“MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.”

“When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.”

“She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.”

“However, he also trusted me to make my own decisions. Contradicting me or telling me what to do wasn't in his nature - even though he secretly may have wanted to.”

“We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.”

“It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.”

“Nature creates few men brave, industry and training makes many.”

“Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.”

“Look, I guess it's natural, you're teenagers, its springtime, everyone's thoughts are turning to birds and bees and caterpillars and moths…..

- Iggy”

“If you give people tools, and they use their natural abilities and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.”

“Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

“A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation.”

“Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.”

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“Those who forgive themselves and are able to accept their real nature, they are the strong ones.”

“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.”

“Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

“This must be part of Mother Nature's master plan—making these boys so irresistibly cute, in such a naughty way, that the purity of their intentions becomes irrelevant.”

“There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal…”

“… Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond's natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.”

“All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.”

“A good river is nature's life work in song.”

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery…”

“The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.”

“A thing of nature.
For every Push, there is a Pull. A consequence.”

“It is a very natural human trait to destroy that which frightens us.”

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!"”

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”

“The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.”

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”

“I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.”

“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

“i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”

“Being polite to a person is not a sign of respect for them. It is merely a sign of a good upbringing and a balanced nature.”

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

“Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”

“Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature.”

“What were good and evil, really, but stupid categories? Stupid categories
that restricted people and punished or rewarded them based on how they responded to their own natures, natures they really didn't have any way to control.”

“I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.”

“Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.”

“Spiritual realization is theoretically the easiest thing and in practice the most difficult thing there is. It is the easiest because it is enough to think of God. It is the most difficult because human nature is forgetfulness of God.”

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”

“Scenery is fine — but human nature is finer.”

“You can use a spear for a walking stick, but it will not change its nature.”

“If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature….”

“A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.”

“I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.”

“I was not a natural…. This is the story of becoming… the Hard Way.”

“Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.”

“A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.”

“Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding”

“One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”

“The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.”

“… it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

“Rest, nature, books, music…such is my idea of happiness.”

“With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.”

“In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.”

“When something horrible happens, it's human nature to want to blame it on someone. We want someone to be held accountable, even though sometimes things just happen.”

“I like people who have a sense of individuality. I love expression and anything awkward and imperfect, because that’s natural and that’s real.”

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift.”

“A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.”

“I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!”

“Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination.”

“So somehow the "isness" of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals.”

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”

“But you've changed,' I whisper. 'Haven't you?'
It is the scorpian's nature to sting. Just because he has no opportunity doesn't mean that he cannot.”

“In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past”

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.”

“No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.”

“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

“The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”

“Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, 'Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold”

“That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.”

“[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing.”

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

“The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.”

“Life sure is easier when you're rich."
"And a natural born charmer. Don't forget that part."
"How could I?" she retorted. "It's the only thing we have in common.”

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.”

“Again, I repeat, don’t ask questions you don’t want answered. Just accept the fact that Acheron is a freak of nature and let it go. (Zarek)”

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

“Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.”

“We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. […] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!”

“Your birth was no mistake or mishap, and your life is no fluke of nature. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He was not at all surprised by your birth. In fact, he expected it.”

“When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.”

“Either the kid was naturally hyper or he was hopped up on enough caffeine to give a heart attack to a water buffalo.”

“So is it just human nature to believe that things happen for a reason - to find some shred of meaning even in the worst experiences?”

“Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.”

“They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation.”

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.”

“It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature.”

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

“Your ultimatum didn’t sit well with me, so naturally, I voiced my opinion.”
“Which was?”
“That you should go copulate with a pig. It sounded way cooler in medieval French.”

“It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.”