Quotes about nature (10000 quotes, page 68)

“Quantum mechanics is the most useful and powerful theory physicists have ever devised. Yet today, nearly 90 years after its formulation, disagreement about the meaning of the theory is stronger than ever. New interpretations appear every year. None ever disappear. … The message from QBism is this: You needn't feel guilty about never getting nervous about this stuff. You were right not to be bothered. But for the sake of intellectual coherence, you had better reexamine what you wrongly may have thought you understood perfectly well about the nature of probability.”

David Mermin (1935) American physicist

Fixing the shifty split http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1618, Physics Today, Volume 65, Issue 7, July 2012, p. 8

Feeling , Appearance

“We're working to overcome the overly macho nature of the current online console game world, where a handful of the high testosterone crowd fight for supremacy, while the mass of casual game players stay away.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

On market expansion
Source: E3 2005

World , Game , Fight

“…to be able to say of a representation that it is "exactly like Nature " is by no means equivalent to saying that it is a fine picture.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Part II : Practical Pictorial Photography, Fidelity to nature and justifiable untruth, p. 3

“On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system, which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel, and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“State of the Art” (p. 136)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Death , God , Food , Imagination

“Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica abstracted time from events, establishing its tractability to scientific calculation. Conceived as pure, absolute duration, without qualities, it conforms perfectly to its mathematical idealization (as the real number line). Since time is already pure, its reality indistinguishable from its formalization, a pure mathematics of change – the calculus – can be applied to physical reality without obstruction. The calculus can exactly describe things as they occur in themselves, without straying, even infinitesimally, from the rigorous dictates of formal intelligence. In this way natural philosophy becomes modern science.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011) (original emphasis)

Way , Intelligence , Mathematics , Reality

“Contemporary with Vitellio and Peccam was… Roger Bacon, a man of almost universal genius, and who wrote on almost every branch of science. He frequently quotes Alhazen on the subject of optics, and seems to have carefully studied his writings, as well as those of other Arabians, which were the fountains of natural knowledge in those days, and which had been introduced into Europe by means of the Moors in Spain. Notwithstanding the pains this great man took with the subject of opticks, it does not appear that, with respect to theory, he made any considerable advance upon what Alhazen had done before him.”

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) English theologian, chemist, educator, and political theorist

Period I To the Revival of Letters in Erope
The History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (1772)

Pain , Quotes , Knowledge , Study

“Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

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

Personality

“Art on the contrary sought this harmony in practice [of art itself]. More and more in its creations it has given inwardness to that what surrounds us in nature, until, in Neo-Plasticism, nature is no longer dominant. This achievement of balance may prepare the way for the fulfillment of man and signal the end of (what we call) art.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to Rudolph Steiner, c. 1921-23; as quoted in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 85
1920's

Art , Way

“Capacity for [higher] nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but my mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favorable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.”

John Stuart Mill book Utilitarianism

Source: Utilitarianism (1861), Ch. 2

Life , Men , Hostility , Pleasure

“Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Source: 'A Plea for Art Photography in America', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Photographic Mosaics,' Vol 28, 1892: About Pictorialism.

Sense , Light , Distant

“I believe it has required a long series of accepted observations for us to have arrived at this idea, now so natural in appearance, that the modifications produced within our nervous system are the only states of which we can have a direct consciousness; and as experimental demonstration is always limited, there can be no absolute certainty that things never happen otherwise, that we never go outside ourselves, and that neither our consciousness nor our nervous influx can exteriorise itself, shoot beyond our material organs, and travel afar in pursuit of objects in order to know or to modify them.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 17

Travel , Idea , Appearance

“The cosmic also keeps me busy, more than the other 'Nieuwe Vizie' ['New Vison'-artists]. For me it means the feeling of forces in nature like electricity, radio, radar, and of forces that one only suspects, and has not been able yet to track down scientifically.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Het kosmische houdt ook mij, wel het meest van De Nieuwe Vizie [-kunstenaars] bezig: het betekent voor mij een aanvoelen van krachten in de natuur als elektriciteit, radio, radar, en van krachten die men slechts vermoedt en wetenschappelijk nog niet heeft kunnen achterhalen.
Quote of Raveel 1974, in the article 'Roger Raveel en zijn keuze uit het Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Gent' http://www.tento.be/sites/default/files/tijdschrift/pdf/OKV1975/Roger%20Raveel%20en%20zijn%20keuze%20uit%20het%20Museum%20voor%20Schone%20Kunsten%20in%20Gent.pdf, ed. Ludo Bekkers; in Dutch art-magazine 'Openbaar Kunstbezit', January-March 1975, p. 13
1970's

Feeling , Business

“Don't come into the music industry. It's almost inevitable that you'll psychologically be quite screwed up. Fame isn't a natural, human, behavioural thing. You get alienated. You're not really surrounded by truth.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[Bernard Perusse, A private path to fame, http://www.canada.com/cityguides/montreal/story.html?id=cb6fe4fc-01ef-4d0b-ad86-7ad091135e1b, The Gazette, canada.com, 2008-06-26]

Truth , Music

“As the peculiar faculty of the eye is to see form and colour, and of the ear to hear sweet tones and voices, so is aspiration peculiar to the soul. To relax from ceaseless aspiration is sin. This energy of aspiration directed to and grasping God, as far as is possible for the creature, is called Hope, which is also a divine virtue. Through this faculty the soul acquires such great confidence that she deems nothing in the Divine Nature beyond her reach.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

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

God , Hope , Soul , Confidence

“This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole…”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Τούτων ἀεὶ μεμνῆσθαι, τίς ἡ τῶν ὅλων φύσις
II, 9
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

“It is as useless for a person to want first of all to decide the externals and after that the fundamentals as it is for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, first of all to decide the nature of its surface, to what bodies it should turn its light, which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces realize its existence and letting the rest come of itself. One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Not until a person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning.”

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

Journal entry, August 1, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Life , Peace , Thinking , Light

“This is Bruno's fundamental idea. He says: ”To recognize this unity of form and matter in all things, is what reason is striving to attain to. But in order to penetrate to this unity, in order to investigate all the secrets of Nature, we must search into the opposed and contradictory extremes of things, the maximum and the minimum” It is in these very extremes that they are intelligible, and become united in the Notion; and this union of them is infinite Nature. “To find the point of union is not the greatest matter; but to develop from, the same its very opposite, this is the real and the deepest secret of the art” It is saying much if we speak of knowing the development of the Idea as a necessity of determinations; we shall see later how Bruno proceeded to do this. He represents the original principle, which is elsewhere known as the form, under the Notion of the minimum, which is at the same time the maximum One, which at the same time is All; the universe is this One in All.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 3 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson) first translated 1896 P. 128
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 3

Secret , Art , Search , Intelligence

“The truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: Accepting the Universe (1920), p.301

Truth

“An immediate consequence of these principles of explanation is that the souls of organic beings, i. e., the compacts of mind-masses, arisen during life, continue to exist after death. (Their isolated persistence is not sufficient). But in order to explain the orderly development of organic nature in which the earlier collected experiences obviously serve as basis for the later creations, it is necessary to assume that these mind-masses enter into a greater compact of mind-masses, the Earth-Soul, and that these serve a higher soul-life according to the same laws as the mind-masses engendered in our nerve-processes observe in their service of our own soul-life.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Life , Death , Law , Soul

“Sculpture should walk on the tips of its toes, unostentatious, unpretentious, and light as the spoor of an animal in snow. Art should melt into and even merge with nature itself. This is obviously contrary to painting and sculpture based on nature. By so doing, art will rid itself more and more of self-centredness, virtuosity and absurdity.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories. p. 327 (1958)
1950s

Art , Light , Animals , Painting

“The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100—as in “intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture,” or “homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned,” and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality
"The Monster's Human Nature", p. 60
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life , People , Lie , Intelligence

“And so, as they kept coming together in greater numbers into one place, finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright and gazing upon the splendor of the starry firmament, and also in being able to do with ease whatever they chose with their hands and fingers, they began in that first assembly to construct shelters. Some made them of green boughs, others dug caves on mountain sides, and some, in imitation of the nests of swallows and the way they built, made places of refuge out of mud and twigs. Next, by observing the shelters of others and adding new details to their own inceptions they constructed better and better kinds of huts as time went on.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter I, Sec. 2

Way , Mountain , Time , Animals

“In the beginning I drew and painted from nature in order to know her. Then later, only to fall under her spell. And today, to let her mirror my thoughts and feelings.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

from the catalog of the traveling exhibition 'Nature in Abstraction', Whitney Museum of modern Art, 1958, p. 61
1950s

Feeling , Painting

“You're still the same girl. What people do doesn't change their nature.'
She shook her head. […] 'What they do is their nature,' she said.”

Kingsley Amis book Take a Girl Like You

Patrick Standish and Jenny Bunn in Ch. 27
Take a Girl Like You (1960)

People , Girl , Change

“To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

Source: Thanatopsis (1817–1821), l. 1

Love

“No individual has a right outside of a collective community. You have rights, not eternally or given by God, or by nature.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

Spencer interview with Dinesh D'Souza for the documentary Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?

God , Communication

“The most interesting thing in nature is that two species exist, only two species, which are expansionist: mankind and insects. All other species are territorial. The insect is a devourer, an expander, it keeps on expanding so much and it doesn’t even care. And mankind is like that, as well… The two species which are going to end up fighting over the world are going to be insects and human beings.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Lo que más interesante es en la naturaleza existen dos especies, unicamente dos especies que son expansionistas: el hombre y los insectos. Las demás especies son territoriales. El insecto es devorador, expansionista, hasta que se siegue expandiendo y no le importa. Y el hombre es así... las dos especies que van a acabar peleándose por el mundo van a ser insectos y hombres.
Interview with Guillermo del Toro. http://www.filmoteca.com/sec4/guidtoro.htm

World , Fight

“It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Quia Imperfectum (1920)
And Even Now http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/evnow10.txt (1920)

Law

“The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are… posed by the multidisciplinary field known as environmental history.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Question

“Creation sleeps! 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and Nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night I, Line 23.

Life , Sleep

“Art can have a considerable influence on our own response to nature. It can enhance our vision, so that we become aware of a new and deeper meaning in what we see around us.”

Walter Thomas Monnington (1902–1976) British artist

Unsourced

Art

“The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

R. N. Shepard, (1994). "Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world." Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1, 2–28.

Color , Way , Optimism , Support

“…You'll never find someone calling A Softer World good natured. I don't think we do a completely bleak comic, but good natured just isn't a way you could ever describe it. Or my novels. Not the way I want.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

Interview with Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics.
I Am Other People

World , Way , Thinking

“In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers, red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic life—so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit—play the same part as flowers in the corn.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

“Similes, Parables and Fables” Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 380A
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Life , Art , Flowers , Suffering

“I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing. The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it's not like that. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.”

Andy Goldsworthy (1956) British sculptor and photographer

He's got the whole world in his hands http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3663966/Hes-got-the-whole-world-in-his-hands.html, The Telegraph (24 March 2007)

Life , Beauty , Dead

“I claim that the success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive—the ones which in fact latched onto the actual regularities in nature.”

Bas van Fraassen (1941) American philosopher

The Scientific Image (1980), p. 40.

Life , Success

“The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. …based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Communication

“Apart from the positive woes of perdition, an eternity of wretchedness grows from the want of love to Christ as naturally as the oak grows from the acorn, or the harvest from the scattered grain. It is not that love to Christ merits heaven; it does far better, it makes heaven. It is, as it were, the organ of sensation that takes note of heaven's blessedness.”

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd (1825–1899) British writer and minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 401.

Love , Christ

“By a state of a system is meant any well-defined condition or property that can be recognised if it occurs again. Every system will naturally have many possible states.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 25

“At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.... Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometers per hour in the future, either.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1950, in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

World , Sense , Light , Time

“What is this free enterprise system? It is the law of the jungle applied to economics. It is the law of every man for himself, as the elephant said when he was dancing among the chickens. That is not a bad philosophy if, like the hon. member for York - Sunbury, you happen to be in the elephant class, but it is likely to be depressing if you are a farmer or worker, and belong in the chicken group. Free enterprise means unrestricted competition; the race to the swift and the battle to the strong; nature red in tooth and claw.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Budget Debate, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, March 22, 1943.

Law , Strong , Dance

“The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 132

Hostility , Sense

“While in the ﬁrst quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “ﬁrst revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions.”

Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002) Austrian American scientist and cybernetician

Source: 1980s, Notes on an epistemology for living things, 1981, p.258

World , Universe , Science

“Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?”

Honoré de Balzac book Séraphîta

Source: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 4: The Clouds of the Sanctuary.

Lie , Law , Science

“Apple's big weakness is its control-freak nature and insistence that there is only one way to make a smart phone. No matter how many carriers sign on to carry the iPhone, in the long run, Apple has again set itself up to be a niche player in smartphones, just as it is in PCs.”

Daniel Lyons (1960) American writer

The Verizon iPhone Is Too Late http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/12/the-verizon-iphone-is-too-late.html in Newsweek (12 January 2011)

Way

“I've heard that story about kids are high naturally, but I've seen kids that aren't high, kids who've had the high taken out of them.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

“Om chanting and meditation is all about getting connected with our true nature.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

OM Chanting and Meditation (2010) http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/OM_Chanting_and_Meditation.html?id=3KKjPoFmf4YC,

“Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life , Death , Food , Home

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Life , People , Truth , Law

“God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.”

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

As quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan 
Context: God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.

God , Motivation

“One type of medical research involves ascertaining whether certain pathological conditions in humans can be alleviated or cured by certain drugs. Animals are used as "models" upon which to test these treatments. To do this it is necessary for the animal subject to have the condition in question, and in order to bring this about healthy animals are made sick. … It turns out, however, that the conditions artificially induced have little in common with the naturally occurring diseases in animals (when these exist) and much less in common with the diseases in man.”

Deborah Mayo American philosopher

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, pp. 343-344

Disease , Question , Animals

“I thought rock and roll was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expression of rebellion. It used to be one channel you could take without ever havin' to kiss arse, you know?”

Keith Richards (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

Rolling Stone; reported in " In quotes: Keith Richards http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6526133.stm", BBC (April 4, 2007).

Kiss

“President Davis said, "The 'free' factory worker in Manchester or Paris- yes, in Boston as well- is free only to starve. As Mr. Hammond from South Carolina put it so pungently in the chambers of the U. S. Senate a few years ago, every society rests upon a mudsill of brute labor, from which the edifice of civilization arises. We are but more open and honest about the nature of our mudsill than other nations, which gladly exploit a worker's labor but, when he can no longer provide it, cast him aside like a used sheet of foolscap."”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 234

“[Fascist ideology was] a variety of socialism which, while rejecting Marxism, remained revolutionary. This form of socialism was also, by definition, anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois, and its opposition to historical materialism made it the natural ally of radical nationalism.”

Zeev Sternhell (1935) Israeli historian

Source: Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France, 1996, p. 268

“It's my nature to go around in high spirits most of the time and then to collapse.”

Margaret Sullavan (1909–1960) actress

from Haywire (1977) by Brooke Hayward. Jonathan Cape Ltd., p. 215. ISBN 0224014269.

Time

“For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

The Growth of Love, Sonnet 8.
Poetry

Secret , Beauty

“In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 334)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Art , Drawing

“Women live entirely in the present, men much more in the future where nature is less well organized.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

A Virgin Heart (trans. 1922)

Women , Men , Future

“Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can’t think of it.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Fountains of Paradise

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 10 “The Ultimate Bridge” (p. 52)

Women , Men , Thinking , Baby

“For Rawls simultaneously appeals to the natural outlook of a democratic society to found his conception of the person, and to his conception of the person to found the basic structure of a democratic society. The warrant of the doctrine of two moral powers is that it ‘suits’ a society in which justice is conceived as fairness; and the warrant of justice as fairness, with its schedule of fundamental principles and primary goods, is that it ‘protects’ the exercise of the two moral powers. The attenuated idea of a person is the theoretical plinth of a desirable constitution, determining what count as primary goods ‘in advance’ of any further requirements of social life – yet is also no more than an ideological reflex of the culture it is supposed to generate. In a vicious circle, public arrangements are deduced from personal capacities defined as adapted to public arrangements.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 4. "Designing Consensus, John Rawls" (1994), p. 108

Life , Justice , Exercises , Idea

“Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks.
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

People , Support , Parting , Personality

“The central place of epistemology in modern philosophy is no accident… Knowledge was not a problem for the ruling philosophy of the Middle Ages; that the whole world which man's mind seeks to understand is intelligible to it was explicitly taken for granted. That people subsequently came to consider knowledge a problem implies that they had been led to accept certain different beliefs about the nature of man and about the things which he tries to understand.”

Edwin Arthur Burtt (1892–1989) American philosopher

Source: The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), p. 2

People , Age , World , Intelligence

“regulation is useful and proper, when aimed at the prevention of fraud or contrivance, manifestly injurious to other kinds of production, or to the public safety, and not at prescribing the nature of the products and the methods of fabrication.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter XVII, Section II, p. 181

Fraud

“Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty.”

Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 29

Life , Marriage , Youth , Dreams

“Charles Darwin's evolution theory states that the strong eat the weak. According to Darwin's evolution theory we are the worst people. But it is actually not so. It is a natural universal law. If we take Darwin's evolution theory literally then God is the worst kind of being. Because God planned creation in a certain way. When love is involved there is no evil. Even mother birds sacrifice their own lives for the sake of their babies.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

TRUE DAY OF ALL THINGS AND THE INITIATOR OF HARMONY http://www.unification.net/1997/970605.html, June 5, 1997

Love , God , People , Law

“Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.”

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

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 (p. 20)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Art , Science

“Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry, or nature is too powerful.”

Tim Powers book The Stress of Her Regard

Source: The Stress of Her Regard (1989), Chapter 17 (p. 285; quoting from the journal of Edward Williams)

God , Past

“Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.”

Erasmus Darwin book The Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden (1791), Part i.

Death , Youth , Age , Cars

“man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature.”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 3, Democracy, Consensus and National Interest, p. 90

Communication

“Had we seen an earthquake, or the results of a powerful storm, the devastation and loss would have been awful — but our country has seen terrible tragedies before: fires, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. We prayed for the lost, rebuilt for the survivors, and strengthened our laws, dikes, weather warnings and earthquake predictors. We prepare for an eventual recurrence of acts of nature…
But 9-11 was not a natural catastrophe: these events were deliberate, conceived, organized and ruthlessly executed by human beings. And so, their significance must be assessed differently — and the actions to prepare for “next time” must be different, also.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Seton Hall Address (2002)

Law , Loss , Time , Weather

“The old "red in tooth and claw" view of the natural economy has to be updated. We need a new metaphor for the forest, one that helps us visualize plants both sharing and competing. … Evolution's engine is fired by genetic self-interest, but this manifests itself in cooperative action as well as solo selfishness. The natural economy has as many trade unions as robber barons, as much solidarity as individualistic entrepreneurship.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"December 3rd — Litter," pages 228-229
The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Help , Selfishness

“Human beings, having, above all creatures, received the power of reason… need to be aware where nature is unaware. Nature reaches its culmination in humans, but human consciousness has not its essence in itself or nature.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

As quoted in Carl Reinhold Bråkenhielm (2009), "Linnaeus and homo religiosus," Universitet, p. 83.

“It is natural for our unamiable sex to dislike the creatures, for you ladies lavish so many caresses upon them.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. II : An Interview; Gilbert to Eliza

Sex

“Instead of inquiring after the nature of the cause of the condensation of nebulous matter, it would indeed be sufficient for the present purpose to call it merely a condensing principle; but since we are already acquainted with the centripetal force of attraction which gives a globular figure to planets, keeps them from flying out of their orbits in tangents, and makes one star revolve around another, why should we not look up to the universal gravitation of matter as the cause of every condensation, accumulation, compression, and concentration of the nebulous matter?”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

p, 125
Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)

Star , Universe , Flying

“Nature is bottom up. It's compelling and complex, and it fills me with joy and it's inconsistent with the top down view.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, 3, Sarah Whitman, Age-old feud: In the beginning, Tampa Bay Times, Florida, February 7, 2014]

Joy

“Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that a rebellion of Arabs against Turks would enable England, while fighting Germany, simultaneously to defeat Turkey. Their knowledge of the nature and power and country of the Arabic-speaking peoples made them think that the issue of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method. So they allowed it to begin…”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Introduction: Foundations of Revolt
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

People , Knowledge , Thinking , Fight

“Nature never makes blunders; when she makes a fool she means it.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Affurisms. From Josh Billings: His Sayings (1865)

Fools

“And as the ideal in the whole of Nature moves in an infinite process toward an Absolute Perfection, we may say that art is in strict truth the apotheosis of Nature. Art is thus at once the exaltation of the natural toward its destined supernatural perfection, and the investiture of the Absolute Beauty with the reality of natural existence. Its work is consequently not a means to some higher end, but is itself a final aim; or, as we may otherwise say, art is its own end. It is not a mere recreation for man, a piece of by-play in human life, but is an essential mode of spiritual activity, the lack of which would be a falling short of the destination of man. It is itself part and parcel of man's eternal vocation.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.183-4

Life , Truth , Beauty , Art

“Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.”

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

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

“A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature — a good bit, of course, but a bit only — in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning
Literary Studies (1879)

“If it is asked why Socrates permits certain forms of art to be retained in the ideal state instead of consistently banishing all alike, the answer is surely obvious: these are, in the opinion of Socrates, the forms which art will take in the hands of men who understand its true nature.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

R. G. Collingwood (1925). "Plato’s philosophy of art." In: Mind. Vaduz, vol. XXXIV, pp.156-7

Men , Art , Understanding

“Through a wise and salutary neglect [of the colonies], a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Works of Edmund Burke Volume ii, p. 117
Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

Wisdom , Way , Feeling , Suffering

“There is something radically wrong, [the anarchist] declares, in a system of society that functions and maintains its existence by the impetus of violence and force. He sees nothing praiseworthy in political society which has recourse to periodic wars, or need of jails, gallows and bludgeons--and it is because he is aware that these brutal weapons are the instruments of every government and State that he works for their destruction. … Unlike the politician, he does not regard dishonesty, brutality and avariciousness as natural characteristics of human nature, but as the inevitable consequences of coercion and frustration engendered by artificial law, he believes that these social evils are best eradicated not by greater penalties and further legislation, but by the free development of the latent forces of solidarity and sympathetic understanding which government and law so ruthlessly suppress. … Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it--for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule.”

George Nicholson (1760–1825) British anarchist and author

"The simplicity of anarchism" in Freedom, 1955. Reprinted in What Is Anarchism?: An Introduction by Donald Rooum, ed. (London: Freedom Press, 1992, 1995) pp. 39-40.

War , People , Law , Penalty

“The search for happiness is natural, because it is the constitutional position of the spirit soul to be eternally joyful. But our search for happiness in the external, physical world is always frustrated; we look everywhere, never realizing permanent pleasure. Temporary, relative pleasure is certainly here to be had, but it is always accompanied by its counterpart: pain. Those who are wise, then, look within, learning how to pursue not only the relative pleasure of this world but, more to the point, they focus on the higher pleasure of the spiritual realm.”

Steven J. Rosen (1955) American editor, author on Vaishnavism

“The Scent Of Happiness”, in The Agni and the Ecstasy (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 302 https://books.google.it/books?id=fYjX7W6SCLMC&pg=PA302.

Pain , Pleasure , World , Soul

“[M]an when not stimulated by hope or necessity is naturally a lazy animal.”

George Trumbull Ladd (1842–1921) American psychologist, educator and philosopher

In Korea with Marquis Ito (1908), page 292

Hope , Animals

“I am sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

Letters published in the Buffalo News (10 June 2001)
2000s

People

“The state of international relations in the sixteenth century is hardly conceivable at this day. The Puritans of England and the Huguenots of France regarded Spain as their natural enemy, and on the high seas and in the British Channel they joined hands with godless freebooters to rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea. Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional menace, but no redress, and no declaration of war.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. I, Ch. 9 Charles IX and Philip II
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death , War , Peace , Sea

“My main problem was, naturally, religion: from it I moved later on to the principles of ethics. First to be examined was my positive religion [ie. Judaism]. It collapsed. So I wanted to base myself on naturaly religion: but my agony was so great, that this [foundation] also collapsed before my eyes. Nothing, nothing remained. I was the most miserable person in the world. I became an atheist.”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Hess' Diary p. 40

World , Religion , Problem , Personality

“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Men , Idea , Knowledge , Change

“The name of a class should reﬂect its intrinsic nature and not a role that it plays in an association. For example, Owner would be a poor name for a class in a car manufacturer's database. What if a list of drivers is added later? What about persons who lease cars? The proper class is Person (or possibly Customer), which assumes various different roles, such as owner, driver, and lessee.”

James Rumbaugh (1947) Computer scientist, software engineer

Source: Object-oriented modeling and design (1990), p. 155; as cited in: Roger Chiang et al (2009, p. 165)

Cars , Personality

“Natural selection, as it is actually used in evolutionary population biology, serves mainly as an optimization process. In fact, the reasoning that underlies much evolutionary biology often strikes social scientists as strongly reminiscent of neoclassical economics.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 19

Optimism

“I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

People , Truth , Feeling , Understanding

“[The situation was] as in the case of his majesty's having undergone a natural and perfect demise…There was then a person in the kingdom different from any other person that any existing precedents could refer to—an heir apparent of full age and capacity to exercise the royal power. It behoved them, therefore, to waste not a moment unnecessarily, but to proceed with all becoming speed and all becoming diligence to restore the sovereign power and the exercise of royal authority.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (10 December 1788) advocating the Prince of Wales being appointed Regent, reprinted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume III (1815), pp. 400-401.
1780s

Age , Exercises , Personality , Speed

“Atrocity lies were the most popular of all, especially in this country and America; no war can be without them. Slander of the enemy is esteemed a patriotic duty. An English soldier wrote (The Times, September 15, 1914): "The stories in our papers are only exceptions. There are people like them in every army." But at the earliest possible moment stories of the maltreatment of prisoners have to be circulated deliberately in order to prevent surrenders. This is done, of course, on both sides. Whereas naturally each side tries to treat its prisoners as well as possible so as to attract others. The repetition of a single instance of cruelty and its exaggeration can be distorted into a prevailing habit on the part of the enemy.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

War , People , Time , Parting

“Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its ‘manner,’ in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself.”

Paul Claudel (1868–1955) French diplomat

as quoted in "The man who got it right," The New York Review of Books, Volume 60, Number 13, August 15, 2013, p. 72

God , Art

“By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 99

Idea

“The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance!
For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth.
In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.
We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 7 (pp. 229-230)

War , Truth , Lie , Age

“It is willingly granted that by cultivation the origination of new varieties is favored, and that by man's labor many varieties are acquired which, under natural conditions, would be lost; but nothing justifies the assumption that the tendency to formation of varieties is so extraordinarily increased that the species speedily lose all stability, and their offspring diverge into an endless series of extremely variable forms. Were the change in the conditions the sole cause of variability we might expect that those cultivated plants which are grown for centuries under almost identical conditions would again attain constancy.”

Gregor Mendel book Experiments in plant-hybridisation

Experiments with Hybrids of Other Species of Plants
Experiments in plant-hybridisation (1865)

Change

“The efforts of a multitude of writers have rather been directed towards producing alternatives for Euclid which shall be more suitable, that is to say, easier, for schoolboys. It is of course not surprising that, in these days of short cuts, there should have arisen a movement to get rid of Euclid and to substitute "a royal road to geometry"; the marvel is that a book which was not written for schoolboys but for grown men (as all internal evidence shows, and in particular the essentially theoretical character of the work and its aloofness from anything of the nature of "practical" geometry) should have held its own as a schoolbook for so long.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908)

Men , Books , Effort

“Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension. We see him only the way a louse sitting upon him would.”

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

Variant: Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size.

As quoted by Abraham Pais in Subtle is the Lord:The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (1982), p. 235 ISBN 0-192-80672-6
Source: Letter to Heinrich Zangger (10 March 1914), quoted in The Curious History of Relativity by Jean Eisenstaedt (2006), p. 126 http://books.google.com/books?id=d2bnXTOtCD8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Way

Quotes about nature page 68

Quotes about nature
page 68