Quotes about nature

page 20

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

“PHILOSOPHY essential nature or essence.”

“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”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Human nature is the same in all professions.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Always respect Mother Nature. Especially when she weighs 400 pounds and is guarding her baby.”

“But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.”

“said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.”

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?”

“Even when there were no more options for the body, the heart's wishes find a way out, and as with all warmth, love rises. Besides, the will to fly was in the nature of the soul, so its home had to be up above”