Quotes about nature
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“This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open to the influences of nature. Receive new thoughts with hospitality. Let us advance.”

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

Source: The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child

“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.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Secret

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

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Love

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

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

World, Loneliness

“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.”

Richelle Mead book The Indigo Spell

Source: The Indigo Spell

Decision

“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.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception

World

“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.”

Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

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

Niccolo Machiavelli book The Prince

Source: The Prince

Men, Training

“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.”

Steven Erikson book House of Chains

Source: House of Chains

War, 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”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Fang

Bird, Bee

“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.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

People, Way

“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.”

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

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Color, Holiday

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

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

“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.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

“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.”

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

Source: Self-Reliance

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

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Source: Naruto: Die Schriften des Tô

Forgiveness, Strong

“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.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Source: Emma

Love, Way, Thinking

“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.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island

“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.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Way, Boy, Parting

“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…”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

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

Ian Fleming book Goldfinger

Source: Goldfinger

Life, Way

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

John Marsden book Tomorrow, When the War Began

Source: Tomorrow, When the War Began

Evil

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

Mark Helprin book Freddy and Fredericka

Source: Freddy and Fredericka

Life

“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…”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

Love, Time

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

Sigmund Freud book The Interpretation of Dreams

Source: The Interpretation of Dreams

Dreams, Soul

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

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

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

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

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

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

and all was light.
Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton.

God, Law, Light, Night

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

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

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

Painting, Perfection

“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.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

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

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

People, World, Way, Problem

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

Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Imagination

“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.”

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

Source: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Weather

“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”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

65 - This poem was used by Eric Whitacre for an a capella SATB chorus titled "i thank you God".
XAIPE (1950)

God, Dreams, Tree

“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.”

Brandon Sanderson The Wheel of Time

Source: A Memory of Light

Personality

“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.”

Jonathan Swift book Les Voyages de Gulliver

Voyage to Brobdingnag, Ch. 6
Source: Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Suffering

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

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Fear, Religion, Hope, Daughters

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

John Gierach (1946) American sportswriter

Source: Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly-Fishing Treasury

Idea, Fish, Flying

“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.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Succubus Blues

People, Stupidity, Way, Evil

“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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Children, Idea

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

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Education

“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.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

Source: Spiritual Perspectives And Human Facts

God, Thinking, Forgetting

“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).”

John Connolly The Book of Lost Things

Source: The Book of Lost Things

Death, Hope, Time

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

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to Benjamin Bailey (March 13, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

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

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Variant: He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.
Source: The Song of Achilles

Change

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

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Life, Books

“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.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Books, World, Education, Sense

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

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Source: Solipsist

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

Cressida Cowell book How to Train Your Dragon

Source: How to Train Your Dragon

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.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

People, Soul

“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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Tear

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

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

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.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

Dreams

“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.”

Louise Penny book The Brutal Telling

Source: The Brutal Telling

Beauty, Tree, Time, Perfection

“… 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.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Suffering

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

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Happiness, Books, Music, Idea

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

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Music

“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.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel book Prozac Nation

Source: Prozac Nation

Health, Way, Support, Suffering

“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.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Abandon

“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.”

Marc Jacobs (1963) American fashion designer

Love, People, Sense

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

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

God, Change, Faith

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

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

God, People, Beauty

“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.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

“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!”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Fear, Time, Parting

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

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

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.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)
Context: There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, "There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue." There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Apostle Paul, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." 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. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.

Evil

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

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

Death, Sex, Way, Thinking

“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.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Change

“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”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Imagination, Reality, Past, Future

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

Italo Calvino The Uses of Literature

Source: The Uses of Literature

“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.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

Pain, World, History, Sense

“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.”

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) French novelist and art critic

Parting

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

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

God

“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.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Love

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

A.A. Milne (1882–1956) British author

“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.”

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

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

Richard Louv (1949) American journalist

Source: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

Sense

“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”

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

“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.”

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

Source: 1920s, p. 157 London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Response to atheist Alfred Kerr in the winter of 1927, who after deriding ideas of God and religion at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Samuel Fischer, had queried him "I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious" as quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971) by H. G. Kessler
Context: Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.

Secret, 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.”

Aristophanés The Knights

Source: The Knights

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

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point

Life

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

Sherwood Smith (1951) American fantasy and science fiction writer

Passion, Indifference

“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.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Natural Born Charmer

Life, Parting, Forgetting

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

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch-22 (1961)

“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)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Question

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

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

War, Parting

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

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Way, 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.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: The Guide for the Perplexed

Youth

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

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“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.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Life, God, Birth, Parent

“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.”

Paula Fox (1923–2017) Amercian book author

Life, Books, Reading

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

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

Water, Heart

“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?”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

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

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Life, Personality

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

Richard Adams book Watership Down

Source: Watership Down

Dependency

“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.”

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

Law

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

John Cowper Powys book A Glastonbury Romance

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 178
Source: A Glastonbury Romance
Context: It is strange how few people make more than a casual cult of enjoying Nature. And yet the earth is actually and literally the mother of us all. One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

People

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

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Youth, Learning

“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.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Way