Quotes about nature
page 5

“Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Book of Rites

Pleasure, Music

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935

Art

“I've found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

7 May 1944
(1942 - 1944)
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

God, Happiness, Faith, Beauty

“Usually I'm remarkably good natured. Try me on a day that doesn't end in y.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

Understanding

“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

“Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Truth, Art, Reality

“Nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know'.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

Life, Education, Strong

“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Beauty, Peaceful

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

Laboratory journal entry #10,040 (19 March 1849); published in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) Vol. II, edited by Henry Bence Jones https://archive.org/stream/lifelettersoffar02joneiala#page/248/mode/2up/search/wonderful,p.248.This has sometimes been quoted partially as "Nothing is too wonderful to be true," and can be seen engraved above the doorway of the south entrance to the Humanities Building at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. http://lit250v.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.universityArchives.historicPhotographs%3A67 <br class="br">Context: ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency.

Law

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Life

“…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Hate

“The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Money, Friendship, Passion, Funny

“a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers as though they were cut flowers in a vase.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Men, Flowers

“Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.”

Martin Cruz Smith (1942) American writer

History

“I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Soul, Autumn, Season

“She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.”

Emile Zola (1840–1902) French writer (1840-1902)

Source: Pot Luck

Love, Pleasure, Passion

“To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Death, Reading

“But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

Mathematics

“These are the two fundamental ways in which the spiritual journey can be approached: you can either go slowly, step-by-step, accepting all natural assistance available to you, or you can ignore all the steps and take the inward leap.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Way

“Water is the driving force in nature.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Water

“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Literature, Tear

“Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Freedom

“In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

“I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.”

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

Money, Beauty, Sex

“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Truth, Art, Dependency

“Nature provides exceptions to every rule.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
History jeers at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original laws by the forms which flow from them. They make a rule; they say from observation what can and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides exceptions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables the man, who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like a mother.

“Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives
must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

“Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Pain

“Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees with different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher

Source: Equisse d'une Théorie de la Pratique (1977), p. 164; as cited in: Jan E. M. Houben (1996) Ideology and Status of Sanskrit, p. 190

“The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Faith, Religion, Faith

“Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

“I have a room all to myself; it is nature.”

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

“Human nature. I don’t like human nature, but I do like human beings.”

Ellen Glasgow book In This Our Life

Source: In This Our Life

“I talk of you:
Why did you wish me milder? would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.”

William Shakespeare Coriolanus

Source: Coriolanus

Falseness

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Heart, Sea

“A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Men

“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Source: Rights of Man

Truth, Appearance

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”

Frank Herbert book Children of Dune

Source: Children of Dune

Truth, Change

“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

Books, Silence, Time

“I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature."”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

As quoted in Quote magazine (14 August 1966)
Source: Truth Against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture

God, Beauty, Peaceful

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.”

Henry Beston book The Outermost House

Source: The Outermost House

Parting

“Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Source: The Cornel West Reader

People

“The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Water

“A noble and God-like character is not a thing of favor or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with God-like thoughts.”

James Allen book As a Man Thinketh

Source: As a Man Thinketh

God, Thinking, Effort, Chance

“Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces.”

Hannah Arendt book The Human Condition

Source: The Human Condition

Love

“A naked lunch is natural to us
We eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Reality, Madness

“The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

Peace, Law

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Beauty, Autumn, Water

“They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Children

“The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable, and that we are united to all this life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship to the universe.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 248

Life, Secret

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

People, Age, World, Fear

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Source: Selected Letters III: 1929-1931

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”

Aristotle book Politics

Source: Politics

Life, God, Animals

“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 2, p. 35

Women

“In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Tomb

"The Tomb" - Written Jun 1917; first published in The Vagrant, No. 14 (March 1922)
Fiction
Context: In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5

Life, Health, Beauty, Dreams

“And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Life, Books, Thinking

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy

Source: The Problems of Philosophy

Life

“The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)
Context: The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure. The same sort of assurance is demanded, in later life, of those who undertake to lead populations into the Promised Land. “Liquidate the capitalists and the survivors will enjoy eternal bliss.” “Exterminate the Jews and everyone will be virtuous.” “Kill the Croats and let the Serbs reign.” “Kill the Serbs and let the Croats reign.” These are samples of the slogans that have won wide popular acceptance in our time. Even a modicum of philosophy would make it impossible to accept such bloodthirsty nonsense. But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.
But if philosophy is to serve a positive purpose, it must not teach mere skepticism, for, while the dogmatist is harmful, the skeptic is useless. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance.

“I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman's relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance… When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.”

Henry Beston book Northern Farm

Source: Northern Farm

Parting

“Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity

Selfishness

“The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

People, Universe

“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge”, p. 57
The Journey Home (1977)
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

Love, Life, Beauty, Art

“Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Soul

“The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Men, Fight

“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Light

“I know whom we must fight… it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.”

Philip Pullman book The Subtle Knife

Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 2 : The Witches
Context: “Sisters,” she began, “let me tell you what is happening, and who it is that we must fight. It is the Magisterium, the Church. For all its history—and that’s not long by our lives, but it’s many, many of theirs—it’s tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can’t control them, it cuts them out. Some of you have seen what they did at Bolvangar. And that was horrible, but it is not the only such place, not the only such practice. Sisters, you know only the north; I have traveled in the south lands. There are churches there, believe me, that cut their children too, as the people of Bolvangar did—not in the same way, but just as horribly. They cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls; they cut them with knives so that they shan’t feel. That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, obliterate, destroy every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the Church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to.

Feeling, History, Fight

“Though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance.”

William Shakespeare The Winter's Tale

Source: The Winter's Tale

Chance

“History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.”

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) German historian and philosopher

History

“Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a super-abundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

As quoted in The Independent (25 February 1989)

Dreams

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

World, Beauty, Peaceful

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Variant: The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Life, Universe, Beauty, Peaceful

“Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: The Art of Poetry

Happiness, Error

“Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Life, Wisdom, Beauty

“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Reading

“.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

Art, Knowledge, Personality

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Source: Quatrevingt-Treize

Music, Flowers, Suffering

“Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Life

“People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist.”

Daisaku Ikeda (1928) Japanese writer

Life, People, Help

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Feeling, Spring

“In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage.”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

War, Peace, Rage

“Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“I hope you hair curls naturally, does it?
Yes, darling, with a little help from others.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

Hope, Help

“There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature… and the thing which pleases us.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Beauty

“No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.”

B.F. Skinner Walden Two

Source: Walden Two

Motivation, Baby

“Every development of truths which relate to human nature, and more especially its active manifestations, is attended with a wish to see worked out in practice what theory has shown us to be just and good. To man, whose mind is seldom satisfied with the calmly beneficent influence of abstract ideas, this desire is perfectly natural, and it increases in liveliness with the spirit of benevolent sympathy in social happiness and well-being. But, however natural in itself, and however noble in its origin, this desire has not unfrequently led to hurtful consequences,—nay, often to greater evils than the colder indifference, or (as from the very opposite cause the same effect may follow) the glowing enthusiasm, which, comparatively heedless of reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Happiness, Truth, Beauty, Idea

“[on becoming an artist] It is my profession, yes [ to be an artist] but a calling.. that a little bit pathetic, a little bit bombastic. I think it was much more natural... I Thought – when I was a child – the only method to be not in the world but outside of the world is to be an artist. I feel me outside, yes..”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

n.p.
Tim Marlow joins Anselm Kiefer to discuss his work' - 2005

World, Feeling, Thinking

“Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”

William C. Roberts (1932) American physician

Quoted in Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet, [//books.google.it/books?id=H_clxwd27CgC&pg=PT107 ch. 5]

Animals

“Employment is Nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.”

Galén (129–216) Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher

Latter day attributions
Source: Day's Collacon: an Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations, (1884), p. 223.

Happiness

“May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 3 <br class="br">Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/

Beauty, Heart

“After the tests [Nuclear tests by India], I had said there was no imminent danger to India's security environment which necessitated us to undertake the tests. But the tests have taken place. Therefore, naturally, as a member of the nation, I have to see the situation in the post-nuclear age. It is now no use discussing whether the tests should have been undertaken or not. But India's nuclear policy from 1988, in fact from 1974, is totally justified.”

I. K. Gujral (1919–2012) Indian politician

The Rediff Interview/I K Gujral

Age

“My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature. And can I do that alone? No. So there is a whole army of youth that can do it. So I suppose my mission is to reach as many of those young people as I can through my own efforts.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Then & Now: Jane Goodall (2005)

People, Youth, World, Effort

“What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty, and we are liberated from wordy arguments.”
Quòd tertio loco à nobis fuit obſeruatum, eſt ipſiuſmet LACTEI Circuli eſſentia, ſeu materies, quam Perſpicilli beneficio adeò ad ſenſum licet intueri, vt & altercationes omnes, quæ per tot ſæcula Philoſophos excrucia runt ab oculata certitudine dirimantur, nosque à verboſis dſputationibus liberemur.

Galileo Galilei book Sidereus Nuncius

Original text as reproduced in Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC, 2006), 101 (p. 3 of 4, insert between pp. 16V & 17R. Original manuscript renders the "q" in "nosque" with acute accent.)
Translation by Albert Van Helden in Sidereus Nuncius (Chicago, 1989), 62
Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1609)

Way