Quotes about nature
page 20

“If nature has made you a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart. And though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) English-American childrens' playwright and author

Time, Heart

“That's what being a demigod was all about, not quite belonging in the mortal world or on Mount Olympus but trying to make peace with both sides of their nature.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

World, Peace

“Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it.”

Neil Strauss book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

Source: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005)

Women, Men, Dogs, Thinking

“I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Life, People, Cars, Thinking

“Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance…”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

God, Dance

“I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.”

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

“A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

People

“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter II: The Market-Place

Suffering

“I do regard her as one who is too modest for the world in general to be aware of half her accomplishments, and too highly accomplished for modesty to be natural of any other woman.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

World

“Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

Sarah Vowell book Assassination Vacation

Source: Assassination Vacation (2005), p. 208

War, People, History, Idea

“The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear…”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Source: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82

Happiness, Music, Loss, Parting

“And that leaves me with the belief that miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

“The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Men, World, Behavior, Change

“We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature", but the study of emic realities shows quite the contrary, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Reality, Study, Change

“People talk about nature as a mother, but to me she's always been Medea, ready and willing to slaughter her children.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ill Wind

Children, People

“And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Life, Reading

“A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Law, Thinking, Personality

“If there is love enough, then nothing-not nature, not even death itself- can come between two who love each other.”

Philippa Gregory book The White Queen

Source: The White Queen

Love, Death

“Sweet is the lore which nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things;
—We murder to dissect.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Source: Lyrical Ballads

“Once I opened my mind to the concept of a greater power, I never struggled with it. Everywhere I went, I felt and saw the existence of a creative intelligence in this universe, of a loving power larger than myself in nature, in people, everywhere.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Love, People, Intelligence, Universe

“There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.”

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

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 7: A Sojourn in Cubapage 168, omits the "all". This is a typo: see 1916 edition page 164
Source: The Wilderness World of John Muir

“Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Elizabeth Kolbert (1961) journalist and author

Source: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Imagination, Time

“Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”

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

People, Shoe, Silence, Clothes

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Life, Happiness, Dependency, Happy

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Variant: It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.

Tree

“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Water

“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

People, Stupidity

“To know a thing well, know it's limits; Only when pushed beyond it's tolerance will it's true nature be seen.
-The Amtal Rule”

Frank Herbert book Children of Dune

Source: Children of Dune

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People, Health, Books, World

“When just starting out on a new journey it's only natural to feel vulnerable. After all it may seem that you have much to lose. But may I remind you that never again at any other point in the same journey will you have so much to gain.”

Mike Dooley (1961) American writer

Feeling

“Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art. <br class="br">XI: "Éloge du maquillage" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89loge_du_maquillage <br class="br">Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Effort, Evil

“But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything.”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Women, Men

“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

Life, People, Pleasure

“Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

“A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.”

Mo Yan (1955) Chinese novelist

Source: Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh and Other Stories

Way

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”

Philip Roth book American Pastoral

Source: American Pastoral

Intelligence

“They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Happiness

“Men and swords. My father said that if you put any able-bodied man, no matter how peaceful, into a room with a sword and a practice dummy and leave him alone, eventually the man would pick up the sword and try to stab the dummy. It is human nature.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bites

Men, Peace

“I just rely on natural talent," said Adrian, strolling up to the start of the Dragon's Lair. "When you have such a wealth of it to draw from, the danger comes from having too much.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Drawing, Wealth

“So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

Love

“Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

"Stairway to Heaven," Thinking in Pictures (1995), p. 202.
Source: Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
Context: Most people don't realize that the slaughter plant is much gentler than nature. Animals in the wild die from starvation, predators, or exposure. If I had a choice, I would rather go through a slaughter system than have my guts ripped out by coyotes or lions while I was still conscious. Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.

Death, People, Birth

“I can't tell them what to do!"
"Why not?" the other girl demanded. "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.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Girl

“See? Anger can be healthy. When the time comes–and it will come–remember that. And what I said. Embrace your powers–love yourself the way Nature made you, and you will prevail. Always.”

Meg Cabot Jinx

Source: Jinx

Love, Way, Time, Anger

“It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

As quoted in "Nearly 100, LSD's Father Ponders his 'Problem Child." (7 January 2006)
Context: It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature. … In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans … The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.

“Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.”

Jane Austen book Emma

Emma (1815)
Works, Emma

Personality

“She was my dream. She made me who I am, and holding her in my arms was more natural to me than my own heartbeat. I think about her all the time. Even now, when I'm sitting here, I think about her. There could never have been another.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Dreams, Thinking, Time

“I swear I've never met a man who has your knack for lack of social grace. If you weren't naturally charming, someone would have stabbed you by now.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

World, Beauty, Color, Light

“But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are. Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Kiss

Pain, Appearance

“I doona need drugs. I am naturally a mean bastard.”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: Be Still My Vampire Heart

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Truth, Evil

“Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?”

Alan Lightman (1948) Physicist, science writer, essayist, novelist

Love, Personality

“Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Love, Life, Flowers, Idea

“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

“Jo had learned that hearts, like flowers, cannot be rudely handled, but must open naturally…”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Flowers, Learning, Heart

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section I, Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Happiness, Pleasure, Selfishness

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

People, Books, Disappointment, Grass

“I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove… that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.”

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

People, Art

“There's only one sort of natural blonde on earth - albinos.”

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

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Source: Where the Wasteland Ends

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

Freya Stark (1893–1993) British explorer and writer

“PHILOSOPHY essential nature or essence.”

Erin McKean (1971) Lexicographer, dictionary editor

The New Oxford American Dictionary

“It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself”

Nick Hornby book Songbook

Source: Songbook

Music

“Throughout history, every period of enlightenment has been accompanied by darkness, pushing in opposition. Such are laws of nature and balance.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Law, History

“For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin

“Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

Peter de Vries (1910–1993) American editor and novelist

“Love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around.”

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

Love, Pain, Way, Grass

“Maybe kissing is sort of like nature's coffee.
-Jonathan”

Scott Westerfeld book Blue Noon

Source: Blue Noon

Coffee, Kiss

“Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Beauty, Angels

“I have to.
I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.”

Kelley Armstrong book Bitten

Source: Bitten

Feeling, Birth, Time, Fight

“A person's true nature is revealed at times of the greatest adversity.”

Daisaku Ikeda (1928) Japanese writer

Time, Personality

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Pain, Change

“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”

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

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Age, Feeling

“I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“People are like animals. Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You go to recognize what's in her nature and accept it.”

Jeannette Walls book Half Broke Horses

Source: Half Broke Horses

People, Animals

“Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”

Harold Bloom book How to Read and Why

Source: How to Read and Why

Learning, Reading

“Oliver: Fear is the natural state of anything that dies.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Last Breath

Fear

“It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

World

“The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold, (1802)
The last three lines of this form the introductory lines of the long Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood begun the next day.
Context: My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

“It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.”

Scott Westerfeld book Peeps

Variant: It’s amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing.
Source: Peeps

Life

“It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

Decision

“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth
Source: Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth

History

“Sometimes the gift of an inquisitive nature to the young can be greater than that of the wisdom which comes of age.”

Brian Jacques book Mattimeo

Source: Mattimeo

Wisdom, Age

“Human nature is the same in all professions.”

Laurence Sterne book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Source: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“Emotions by their very nature are not reasonable things.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

“History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

History, Idea, Time

“Anything unnatural was not naturally believed. Faith, in essence, was unnatural.”

Ted Dekker book Saint

Source: Saint

Faith

“There is a time for hello and a time for good-bye. It's why the act of burying thing seems natural, but the act of digging them up does not.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Time

“Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.”

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

Ideas and Opinions
1950s, Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Beauty, Joy

“A sacrament--like marriage--means living a life better than your natural instincts, so that you're modeling God. And God never gives up.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Life, God, Marriage

“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 57.
Context: Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. … Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust.

People, Fight