Quotes about nature
page 59

“The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. All it will take is one natural disaster to prove how wrong that is. Then, the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite — women and men — will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers. We are such a parasitic class.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Playboy interview (May 1995)

Women, Men

“The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. …. I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

quote from an extract of 'Barbara Hepworth – the Sculptor carves because he must, The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932, p. 332
1932 - 1946

Beauty, Way, Feeling, Idea

“The last century was defined by physics. From the minds of the world’s leading physicists there flowed a river of ideas that would transport man kind to the very pinnacle of wonder and to the very depths of despair. This was a century that began with the certainties of absolute knowledge and ended with the knowledge of absolute uncertainty. It was a century in which physicists developed theories that would deny us the possibility that we can ever properly comprehend the nature of physical reality. It was also a century in which they built weapons with the capacity utterly to destroy this reality.”

Jim Baggott (1957) British writer

The Quantum Story: A History In 40 Moments (2011), Preface

World, Idea, Knowledge, Reality

“This new model of development would be based clearly on the goal of sustainable human well-being. It would use measures of progress that clearly acknowledge this goal. It would acknowledge the importance of ecological sustainability, social fairness, and real economic efficiency. Ecological sustainability implies recognizing that natural and social capital are not infinitely substitutable for built and human capital, and that real biophysical limits exist to the expansion of the market economy.”

Robert Costanza (1950) American economist

Source: Toward a New Sustainable Economy, 2008, p. 45

“I have experienced this country of the great mountains [Switzerland] superb!…. [but] I positively believe that nature, most appropriate to be reproduced in painting, is the modest landscape which seems just ordinarily and very insignificant. (translation from original French: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original French text:) J'ai trouvé ce pays de grandes montaignes superbe!.. .[mais] Je crois positivement que la nature la plus faite pour être reproduite en peinture, est le paysage modeste et qui parait ordinarement le plus insignificant.
In a letter, 1894; as cited in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, 2006, p. 19 - ISBN13 978 90 6868 432 2
late quote of Roelofs, in a letter of his travel with his (painter-)sons to Switzerland
1890's

Mountain, Painting, Country

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men, Age, Soul, Intelligence

“The bewildered novice in chess moves cautiously, recalling individual rules, whereas the experienced player absorbs a complicated situation at a glance and is unable to account rationally for his intuition. In like manner mathematical intuition grows with experience, and it is possible to develop a natural feeling for concepts such as four dimensional space.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Introduction, The Nature of Probability Theory, p. 2.
An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition)

Feeling, Mathematics

“The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but little coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical.
It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbours' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of Tightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes — sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 24

Death, Women, Men, World

“The concept of peace is easy to grasp; that of international security is more complex, for a pattern of contradictions has arisen here as well. As major nuclear Powers have begun to negotiate arms reduction agreements, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction threatens to increase and conventional arms continue to be amassed in many parts of the world. As racism becomes recognized for the destructive force it is and as apartheid is being dismantled, new racial tensions are rising and finding expression in violence. Technological advances are altering the nature and the expectation of life all over the globe. The revolution in communications has united the world in awareness, in aspiration and in greater solidarity against injustice. But progress also brings new risks for stability: ecological damage, disruption of family and community life, greater intrusion into the lives and rights of individuals.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

An Agenda for Peace : Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping (1992)
1990s

Life, World, Family, Peace

“Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away. Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong. Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish and must hasten on. What that work may be—what this world's share is in the great design—we know not, though our unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral insect working deep under the dark waters, we strive and struggle each for our own little ends, nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up for God.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, God, Age

“Formulating consists of determining the system inputs, outputs, requirements, objectives, constraints. Structuring the system provides one or more methods of organizing the solution, the method of operation, the selection of parts, and the nature of their performance requirements. It is evident that the processes of formulating a system and structuring it are strongly related.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70

Parting

“There is no War on Terrorism; it is The Great Game speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the superpower, ensuring infinite dangers for us all.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

John Pilger, 'War on Terror' a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist, America itself http://johnpilger.com/articles/-war-on-terror-a-smokescreen-created-by-the-ultimate-terrorist-america-itself

War, Game, Speed

“As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system's administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:The law of nature is in that state put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Law, Perfection

“[I have had many a talk with Cromwell] of god, of nature & of other polytyke & wordly thyngys [from which he has] geddryd more frute of truth then I have downe of any other man lyvyng syth I cam here to my cuntrey.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Thomas Starkey.
About

God, Truth

“People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

Source: The Power Elite (1956), p. 14.

People, Imagination

“Why, gentlemen, humor is one of the most valuable things in the human brain. It is the torch of the mind -- it sheds light. Humor is the readiest test of truth -- of the natural, of the sensible -- and when you take from a man all sense of humor, there will only be enough left to make a bigot.”

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

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Truth, Sense, Light

“Among flower vases, the ware that is given the highest rank is old Iga, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it commands the highest price. When old Iga has been dampened, its colors and its glow take on a beauty such as to awaken on afresh. Iga was fired at very high temperatures. The straw ash and the smoke from the fuel fell and flowed against the surface, and as the temperature dropped, became a sort of glaze. Because the colors were not fabricated but were rather the result of nature at work in the kiln, color patterns emerged in such varieties as to be called quirks and freaks of the kiln. The rough, austere, strong surfaces of old Iga take on a voluptuous glow when dampened. It breathes to the rhythm of the dew of the flowers.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Beauty, Color, Flowers, Strong

“What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Source: The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859), Ch. I.

“What is that policy? That now that we had got the men we had been fighting against down, we should punish them as severely as possible, devastate their country, burn their homes, break up their very instruments of agriculture.. It is that we should sweep – as the Spaniards did in Cuba; and how we denounced the Spaniards! – the women and children into camps…in some of which the death-rate has risen so high as 430 in the thousand. I do not say for a moment, because I do not think for a moment, that this is the deliberate and intentional policy of His Majesty's Government…at all events, it is the thing which is being done at this moment in the name and by the authority of this most humane and Christian nation. Yesterday I asked the leader of the House of Commons when the information would be afforded, of which we are so sadly in want. My request was refused. Mr. Balfour treated us with a short disquisition on the nature of war. A phrase often used is that "war is war", but when one comes to ask about it one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Holborn Restaurant (14 June 1901), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 349
Leader of the Opposition

Death, Women, Men, War

“Hobbes clearly proves that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On Poetry: Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733)

War

“The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. I think, therefore I produce. In so doing, we will have the leisure to experiment with spirituality, and the opportunity of reconciliation with nature, without sacrificing the material wellbeing of our children. The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 390 as cited in: Jari Peltola (2006)

Children, Age, Dreams, Problem

“Our mind, by virtue of a certain finite, limited capability, is by no means capable of putting a question to Nature that permits a continuous series of answers. The observations, the individual results of measurements, are the answers of Nature to our discontinuous questioning.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

As quoted in Schrödinger: Life and Thought (1989) by Walter Moore

Question

“Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature, and we responded with the best of America, with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2001, A Great People Has Been Moved to Defend a Great Nation (September 2001)

Way, Evil, Help

“A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe, which I hope to enable you to read, with your own eyes, tonight.
Let me add, that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert, that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches-pocket, though ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer, and therefore a better, conception of this wonderful universe, and of man’s relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Truth, World, Hope, History

“Liberals have developed a utopian vision of how nature should behave. It must remain in perfect balance. To that end, they'll exterminate harmless critters that violate the liberal idea of Order; of species correctness. For example, when a delightful flock of gentle conure parrots made San Francisco's Telegraph Hill its home, radical environmentalists demanded the flock be exterminated because it wasn't indigenous. While animals may not migrate illegally, or disrupt the preordained 'natural' order—liberal central planners encourage non-indigenous peoples to mess with the social habitat of historic, host populations. Provided they're Caucasian.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Is Diversity Driving A Decline in White Population?" http://www.wnd.com/2018/04/the-decline-of-u-s-whites-and-not-just-in-number/ WND, April 19, 2018 2010s, 2018

People, Home, Idea, Animals

“My father was a really good craftsman – he was a silversmith – so I grew up understanding how things were made. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but everything that has been made has been thought about, designed, and I think that growing up with an appreciation of the nature of objects was hugely influential to me.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Vogue: "Quiet By Design: Naomi Campbell Interviews Jony Ive" (2 April 2018)

Understanding, Thinking

“Amendments ought not to be made, except in cases where the alteration is of such a nature as that no one can be misled by it.”

Richard Arden, 1st Baron Alvanley (1744–1804) British judge and politician

Ex parte Motley et uxor (1801), 1 Bos. & Pull. 456.

“When I was a boy I was tremendously interested in scarecrows. They always seemed to my childish imagination as just about to wave their arms, straighten up and stalk across the field on their long legs. I lived on a farm, you know. It was natural then that my first character in this animated life series was the scarecrow, on whom I have taken revenge for all the mystic feeling he once inspired.
Then came the Tin Woodman, named because of the oddity of a Woodman made of tin, and then Pumpkinhead, and now, of course, the Wogglebug.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), About The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum "Philadelphia North American", (3 October 1904), as quoted by "Map of Kansas Literature" http://www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping/baum/ Washburn.edu.

Life, Feeling, Imagination, Boy

“Men are always more inclined to pitch their estimate of the enemy's strength too high than too low, such is human nature.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

Men

“The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?”

André Gide book The Immoralist

Source: The Immoralist (1902), p. 159

People, Beauty

“Any time a woman's sexuality is used to her own advantage, it can be incredibly divisive. It depends on HOW exactly they found it to be sexist. Towards women? I totally disagree. Navaar was very much in control of her choices and her sisters; she wasn't being exploited by anyone. If a woman chooses to wield her sexuality as a tool, that choice is hers alone. Sexism is the discrimination against a person based upon gender. If anybody was sexist, it was Navaar, who assumed the men were weaker and vulnerable because of their nature as men.”

Cyia Batten (1972) American actress

Enterprise's Orion Slave Girls https://www.startrek.com/article/enterprises-orion-slave-girls-part-2 (March 17, 2017)

Women, Men, Sister, Time

“The nature of unemployment today is totally different from what it was a year ago. It is no longer caused by a deficiency of demand. There is no longer a potential surplus supply of the things we want. The transition to full employment is hindered by two obstacles. The first is due to the difficulty of shifting labour to the points where it is wanted. The second— and, for the time being, the chief—-obstacle is caused by the difficulties, other than the shortage of labour, in the way of existing demand becoming effective.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: How to Pay for the War (1940), Ch. 3 : Our Output Capacity and the National Income

Way, Time

“In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother … a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“February: Good Oak”, p. 15-16.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"

Youth, History, Idea, Birth

“I remember I stood stunned as a boy, in front of the paintings of the old [Dutch] masters in our museums, how they let speak Nature to you. If I have learned to see nature by someone, it was by our old masters. But most by Nature itself.”

Jan Hendrik Weissenbruch (1824–1903) Dutch painter of the Hague School (1824-1903)

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018 version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: Ik herinner me, dat ik als jongen in onze museums voor de schilderijen van de oude meesters verstomd stond, zoals ze de natuur tot je lieten spreken. Als ik van iemand geleerd heb de natuur te zien dan is het van onze oude meesters. Maar het meest van de natuur-zelve. in an interview with J.H. Rössing, at the end of his life, c. 1902; as cited in Eind goed Al goed, de carriere van J.H. Weissenbruch https://www.artsalonholland.nl/grote-meesters-kunstgeschiedenis/johan-hendrik-weissenbruch-haagse-school, by Sander Kletter

Boy, Learning, Painting

“It were to be wished that no youth of genius were suffered ever to look into Statius, Lucan, Claudian, or Seneca the tragedian; authors who, by their forced conceits, by their violent metaphors, by their swelling epithets, by their want of just decorum, have a strong tendency to dazzle and to mislead inexperienced minds, and tastes unformed, from the true relish of possibility, propriety, simplicity, and nature. […] If I might venture to pronounce so rigorous a sentence, I would say, that the Romans can boast of but eight poets who are unexceptionably excellent,—namely, Terence, Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Phaedrus. These only can be called legitimate models of just thinking and writing. Succeeding authors, as it happens in all countries, resolving to be original and new, and to avoid the imputation of copying, become distorted and unnatural. By endeavouring to open an unbeaten path, they deserted simplicity and truth; weary of common and obvious beauties, they must needs hunt for remote and artificial decorations…”

Joseph Warton (1722–1800) English literary critic

An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Vol. II (1782), pp. 21–24

Truth, Youth, Beauty, Thinking

“The Darwinians have coined the terms pseudoteleology and teleonomy to designate the finality which they at the same time deny. Appearances are deceptive, they say; the materials of life are always the work of chance. What some take for finality is only the result of the ordering of random materials bynatural selection. Even were this to be true, as it is not, the demon of finility would still not have been exorcized. For natural selection is, in essence and function, the supreme finilizing agent. Actually, the terms pseudoteleology and teleonomy are the homage paid to finality, as hypocrisy pays homage to virtue. Giard (1905), himself a shrewd scholar but blinded by a foolish anticlericalism, went so far as to abjure Lamarckism and write, "To account for the wondrous adaptations such as those we observe between orchids and the insects that fertilize them, we have hardly any choice but the bare alternative hypotheses: the intervention of a sovereignly intelligent being, and selection." He cannot have seriously subjected his supposed dilemma to critical scrutiny or he would have seen that he was substituting for the dethroned divinity just such another, a sorting and finalizing, in sum transcendental, agent, natural selection. Paul Wintrebert, a convinced and even intractable atheist, did not fall into the same trap but realized perfectly that Giard's alternative involves, whatever opinion be held, recognizing the intervention of a purposive guiding agent. Giard's concept, which is that held by many atheists and "freethinkers", gives a singular and belittling idea of God. The Almighty, obliged to remodel and retouch His own handiwork.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 165
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)

Life, God, Intelligence, Idea

“If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, — and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)

People, Law, Thinking

“The connection between facts and values is straightforward and philosophically uninteresting… values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures; the well-being of conscious creatures is what can be valued in this universe… Now, here’s the one bit of philosophy I’m going to anchor this to: imagine a universe in which every conscious creature suffers as much as it can for as long as it can – I call this the worst possible misery for everyone. The worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If the word bad is to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone… the moment you grant me that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and therefore worth avoiding… well then you have every other possible constellation of conscious experience which, by definition, is better. So you have this continuum here of states of consciousness and given that consciousness is related to the way the universe is, it’s constrained by the laws of nature in some way, there are going to be right and wrong ways to move along this continuum… now this is, in philosophy, a somewhat controversial statement. I do not see how.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Sam Harris: Can Science Determine Human Values? http://fora.tv/2010/11/10/Sam_Harris_Can_Science_Determine_Human_Values (2010/11/10) 2010s

Law, Way, Imagination, Suffering

“Infinite product spaces are the natural habitat of probability theory.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 130

“I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

Epitaph on his grave in Lancaster, Pensylvania
1860s

Life, Death, Solitude

“The EU violates just about every green principle going. It is the opposite of local; it is destructive to the natural world; it wipes out cultural distinctiveness; it is anti-democratic; it puts the interests of banks and corporations before the interests of its working people. Why – when – how – did the Green Movement abandon its commitment to localism and democracy, and jump into bed with a beast like this?”

Paul Kingsnorth (1972) English writer and environmentalist

"Brexit Reconsidered: a Modern Day Peasants’ Revolt?", Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/21/brexit-reconsidered-a-modern-day-peasants-revolt/ December 21, 2016

People, World, Democracy

“It were Happy if we studied Nature more in natural Things; and acted according to Nature; whose rules are few, plain and most reasonable.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

9
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

Happiness, Study

“The optimal scale of the economy is smaller, the greater (a) the degree of complementarity between natural and man-made capital; (b) our desire for direct experience of nature; and (c) our estimate of both the intrinsic and instrumental value of other species. The smaller the optimal scale of the economy, the sooner its physical growth becomes uneconomic.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics: Essays. 1999, p. 20.

Optimism

“And truly, I to hope that I have made this thing somewise clear unto you; for, indeed, it doth be something hard to set out; for every Age hath the subtleties peculiar to that Age; and these to be hard to the understanding of other Ages, but yet to seem plain and utter natural, even without thought, unto the Peoples of the Age.”

William Hope Hodgson book The Night Land

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 13

People, Age, Hope, Understanding

“There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

28 May 1794
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)

Justice, Law

“If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)

World, History, Light, Science

“Structural concept in nature:
The grouping of the smallest recognizable entities in matter:
Bone matter is cellular or tubular. Ligament structure is a sinuous-fibrous web.
Tendons are continuous with the connective tissue of the muscle, strengthened by cross grain.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.8 Material Structure. in Nature, p. 26
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

“[From Reginald Clinton]: I do not believe that the heart is turned from the Creator by enjoying his works. Of what avail is the sweet breath of the rose, the morning song of the lark? The pleasure they impart is not matter of necessity, and yet we delight in both. The soul of the poet is as much His gift as the fragrance of the flower, or the lay of the bird; and the page where inspired words record heroic deed, touching sorrow, or natural loveliness, is one of those pleasures for which we should be thankful. I, for my part, believe most devoutly in the Almighty mercy, when I see how much that is beautiful and gladdening has been scattered over our pilgrimage here.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Pleasure, Beauty, Soul, Flowers

“There is a radical dualism between the empirical nature of man and its moral nature.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 59.

“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Vol. 1, pt. 1.
Panegyric (1989)

World

“From such a face and form as mine, the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination!
It's human nature! I'm resigned.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

H.M.S. Pinafore (1878)

Imagination

“As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Introduction. p. 24.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Age, Game, Communication, Idea

“The concept of a random walk is simple but rich for its many applications, not only in finance but also in physics and the description of natural phenomena. It is arguably one of the most founding concepts in modern physics as well as in finance, as it underlies the theories of elementary particles, which are the building blocks of our universe, as well as those describing the complex organization of matter around us.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 2, Fundamentals Of Financial Markets, p. 38.

Universe

“Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Sermon VII : Outward and Inward Morality
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)

Love, Life, God, Spring

“The author of human nature impressed it with certain sensitive aptitudes and mental powers, so that apprehension, reflection or understanding could no otherwise be exerted or produced in the compound nature of man, but in the order prescribed by the creator.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section I - Argumentative Reflections on Supernatural and Mysterious Revelation in General

Understanding

“While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of three millions of innocent men and women, it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men. There can be no peace to the wicked while slavery continues in the land. It will be condemned; and while it is condemned there will be agitation. Nature must cease to be nature; men must become monsters; humanity must be transformed; Christianity must be exterminated; all ideas of justice and the laws of eternal goodness must be utterly blotted out from the human soul—ere a system so foul and infernal can escape condemnation, or this guilty republic can have a sound, enduring peace.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Women, Men, God, Peace

“All art is but imitation of nature.”
Omnis ars naturae imitatio est.

Seneca the Younger (-4–65 BC) Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist

Source: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXV: On the first cause, Line 3.

Art

“The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 145-146

“Light in nature creates movement in color. The movement is provided by the relationships of uneven measures, of colors contrasts among themselves and constitutes Reality [In this quote Delaunay is referring to his series 'Window'-paintings', which he had started in 1912].”

Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) French painter

Quote in: 'Nous irons jusqu'au soleil', Delaunay; as cited in 'Futurism', ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 217
1915 - 1941

Color, Quotes, Reality, Light

“On account of their savage nature, the Bedouins are people who plunder and cause damage. They plunder whatever they are able to lay their hands on without having to fight or to expose themselves to danger. They then retreat to their pastures in the desert. They do not attack or fight except in self-defence. Every stronghold or (locality) that seems difficult to attack, they by-pass in favour of some less difficult (enterprise). Tribes that are protected by inaccessible mountains are safe from their mischief and destructiveness. The Bedouins would not cross hills or undergo hardship and danger in order to get to them. Flat territory, on the other hand, falls victim to their looting and prey to their appetite whenever they (have the opportunity of) gaining power over it. Then they raid, plunder, and attack that territory repeatedly, because it is easily (accessible) to them. Eventually, its inhabitants succumb utterly to the Bedouins and then are pushed around by them in accordance with changes of control and shifts in leadership. Eventually, their civilization is wiped out. God has power over His creatures.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 118, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

God, People, Mountain, Change

“As indicated by its title "A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology", this book is not just concerned with the chronology of events or with biographical details of great psychiatrists and psychopathologists. It has as its main interest, a study of the ideas underlying theories about mental illness and mental health in the Western world. These are studied according to their historical development from ancient times to the twentieth century.
The book discusses the history of ideas about the nature of mental illness, its causation, its treatment and also social attitudes towards mental illness. The conceptions of mental illness are discussed in the context of philosophical ideas about the human mind and the medical theories prevailing in different periods of history. Certain perennial controversies are presented such as those between the psychological and organic approaches to the treatment of mental illness, and those between the focus on disease entities (nosology) versus the focus on individual personalities. The beliefs of primitive societies are discussed, and the development of early scientific ideas about mental illness in Greek and Roman times. The study continues through the medieval age to the Renaissance. More emphasis is then placed on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the enlightenment of the eighteenth, and the emergence of modern psychological and psychiatric ideas concerning psychopathology in the twentieth century.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Introduction text.
A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990)

Health, Books, Age, World

“[I]n the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences; for both the loading of the earth with triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility into nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer. But if it be granted that the earth moves, it would seem more natural to suppose that there is no system at all, but scattered globes… than to constitute a system of which the sun is the centre. And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients… whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new… and was first introduced by Copernicus. …But if the earth moves, the stars may either be stationary, as Copernicus thought or, as it is far more probable, and has been suggested by Gilbert, they may revolve each round its own centre in its own place, without any motion of its centre, as the earth itself does… But either way, there is no reason why there should not be stars above stars til they go beyond our sight.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1653, written ca. 1612) Ch. 6, as quoted in "Description of the Intellectual Globe," The Works of Francis Bacon (1889) pp. 517-518, https://books.google.com/books?id=lsILAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA517 Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath.

Age, World, Way, Star

“We are a great and strong country — perhaps the greatest and strongest in the history of the world. But greatness and strength are not our natural right. They are not gifts which are automatically ours forever. It took toil and courage and determination to build this country — and it will take those same qualities if we are to maintain it. For, although a country may stand still, history never stands still. Thus, if we do not soon begin to move forward again, we will inevitably be left behind. And I know that Americans today are tired of standing still — and that we do not intend to be left behind. But effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction. For, as Socrates told us, "If a man does not know to what port he is sailing, no wind is favorable."”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Speech at the Coliseum, Raleigh, North Carolina" (17 September 1960) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=74076 1960

World, History, Courage, Effort

“It is a place rich in natural resources, having everything we need for national defense, a crucial place for the empire's self-reliance. The place is crucial too for our wars with China, Russia, and the U. S.”

Seishirō Itagaki (1885–1948) Japanese general

About sending troops to China's northeast. March 1931, from speech entitled "Manchuria and Mongolia from the Military Point of View". Quoted in "China in the World Anti-Fascist War" by Peng Xunhou - Page 23 - 2005.

War

“This is the Outsider's extremity. He does not prefer not to believe; he doesn't like feeling that futility gets the last word in the universe; his human nature would like to find something it can answer to with complete assent. But honesty prevents his accepting a solution that he cannot reason about.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter Five, The Pain Threshold

Feeling, Universe

“The city offers certainly advantages, I agree. But I think that they do not outweigh the direct, unadulterated inspiration of the natural life that I find here”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

in the country, in Machelen
version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): De stad biedt ongemene voordelen, accoord. Maar ik vind dat ze niet opwegen tegen de directe, onvervalste inspiratie van het natuurlijke leven dat ik hier [in Machelen] vindt.
Quote of Raveel, in an interview with Hugo Claus, published in the Flemish magazine 'Vooruit' in 1957 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
Raveel lived his entire life in the Flemish village of Machelen, on the river De Leie
1945 - 1960

Life, Thinking, Country

“I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions.”

John Cleland book Fanny Hill

Page 129
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

Imagination

“God attracts us to Him by instincts, and desires, and aspirations after a happiness higher than sense, and more enduring, more changeless, than this mortal life. God speaks to us articulately in the stirring life of nature, and in the silence of our own being.”

Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892) English Roman Catholic archbishop and cardinal

Source: Towards Evening (1889), p. 158

Life, God, Happiness, Sense

“In a fundamental sense, Alchian's theory of economic organizations is different from those of Coase or Simon. He disavows an explicit model of individual choice… and… offers a system-level explanation of organizational emergence, structure, and survival that is largely independent of decision making at the micro level… Yet it is precisely this independence of a distinct model of choice that ultimately renders it compatible with the individualistic theories of both Coase and Simon….
Whether individuals optimize under uncertainty or satisfice under the more limiting conditions of bounded rationality…, Alchian's logic of natural selection, when grafted onto either approach, provides a powerful means of deriving and integrating expectations about individuals, organizations and systems. The result in either case is an approach that gains in scope and coherence, and that does so by remaining true to its underlying model of individual choice.”

Terry M. Moe (1949) American political scientist

Source: "The new economics of organization." 1984, p. 746-747; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 56)

Optimism, Decision, Sense

“Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious soul as well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is part of them.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 70

Men, Soul, Intelligence, Communication

“Among the seminal discoveries in biology in the twentieth century were the chemical nature and the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry

“And then about whether or not to work from a given in nature. In my view, you [ Van Doesburg ] define this in a rather narrow sense. In the main, I do agree with you that the destruction of the natural, and it reconstruction, must be accomplished according to a spiritual image, but I believe that we should take a broad view here. What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky ['Composition, Checkerboard Dark Colours', 1919] and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, 18 April 1919; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, pp. 125-6
1910's

Sense

“Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Spirituality and Temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Cromwell's preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals, March 1533.

God, People, World, History

“The weakness of our nature—how soon any strong emotion masters it!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Strong

“As regards very small celestial bodies of a light-minded nature, the law of levity is allowed to supersede the law of gravity.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Atlas, in Ch. 4
Space Chantey (1968)

Law, Light

“Men and women grow older in this world of ours, and as the years advance they change. Of all the changes that they undergo those of their moral natures are the most painful to watch. The boy changes into the man, and there is something lost which never seems to come back again. It is like the first glow of the morning that passes away — like the bloom on the blossom that never is restored. Your grown-up boy is wise in bad things which he used to know nothing about. His life no longer sounds with a perfectly clear ring, or shines with a perfectly white lustre. He is no longer unspotted.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

"Unspotted from the World"

Life, Women, Men, Pain

“The light falls so unfavorably on the altar that one can hardly discern the figures or enjoy the beauty of color and the delicacy of the heads and draperies which I executed with great care from nature and completely successfully according to the judgement of all. Therefore, seeing that all the merit in the work is thrown away and since I cannot obtain the honor due my efforts unless the results can be seen, I do not think I will unveil it.”

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish painter

Quote of Rubens, in his letter to Count Annibale Chieppio (minister of the Duke of Mantua), February 2, 1608; as cited in Rembrandts Eyes', by w:Simon Schrama, Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, New York 1999, p. 130 (LPPR, 42)
Rubens reports in this quote about the overdoses of light, falling upon his recently-made altar-painting 'Virgin and Child Adored by Angels', (Rome, Santa Maria, Vallicella), 1607 which is fading the colors for the viewer.
1605 - 1625

Beauty, Color, Thinking, Effort

“The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most "unquestionable" truths. A century ago, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud's sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton's theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein's theory, although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to have been taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000), p. 4

People, Truth, Stupidity, Question