“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series
Variant: Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 12, 2021. History

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Ralph Waldo Emerson 727

American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882

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“There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.”

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Context: Men's works also are naturally perishable and mutable and subject to every kind of alteration. But since God is eternal, it follows that of such sort are his ordinances also. And since they are such, they are either the natures of things or are accordant with the nature of things. For how could nature be at variance with the ordinance of God? How could it fall out of harmony therewith?

“We should not speak of all subjects in one tone and in the same manner. We do not march at the head of a regiment as we walk on a promenade; and we should use the same style in which we should naturally speak of different things in the same way, with the same difference as we should walk, but always naturally, and as is suitable, either at the head of a regiment or on a promenade.”

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“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul.”

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Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Arthur Edward Waite (1887). The Real History of the Rosicrucians Founded on Their Own Manifestoes https://archive.org/stream/realhistoryofros00waituoft#page/290/mode/1up. p. 290
Waite commented: "Like others of his school, Fludd insists on the uncertainty of a posteriori and experimental methods, to which he unhesitatingly attributes all the errors of the natural sciences..."

“Thought forms in the soul the same way clouds form in the air.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.”

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