Nature Quotes

Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

Mere

An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.

Washington Irving

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Albert Einstein

Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

Eugene Paul Wigne

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

Johann von Goethe

Humanity is not a gift of nature, it is a spiritual achievement to be earned.

Richard Bach

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

Cicero

In the mirrorlike relationship between wine and human beings, Zinfandel owned more reflective properties than any other grape; in its infinite mutability, it was capable of expressing almost any philosophical position or psychological function. As a result, its own true nature might never be known.

David Darlington, from his novel Angels Visits: An Inquiry into the Mystery of Zinfandel

Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - The great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.

W. B. Yeats

It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the directions of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.

Thomas Huxley

To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.

Carl Jung

Nature has a great simplicity and therefore a great beauty.

Richard Feynman

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels (1613)

To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.

Seneca

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitalitythe supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

People are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man.

Nikita Khrushchev

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

Margaret Fulle

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.

Archibald Alexande

Human nature constitutes a part of the evidence in every case.

Elisha Potte

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten much as we can easily destroy our puny selves.

Stephen Jay Gould

If any human being earnestly desire to push on to new discoveries instead of just retaining and using the old to win victories over Nature as a worker rather than over hostile critics as a disputant to attain, in fact, clear and demonstrative knowlegde instead of attractive and probable theory we invite him as a true son of Science to join our ranks.

Francis Bacon

Nothing happens to any thing which that thing is not made by nature to bear.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations

By nature, men are nearly alike by practice, they get to be wide apart.

Confucius

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge... observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

Denis Diderot

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot slander human nature it is worse than words can paint it.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

We still do not know one - Thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Albert Einstein

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.

Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse upon the First Ten Books of Livy

I believe it is the nature of people to be heroes, given the chance.

James A. Autry

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Arthur C. Clarke

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality. Its soverign law is subordination and dependence.

Marquis de Vauvenargues

Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.

Bellamy Brooks

Nature loves a burst of energy.

Boe Lightman

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

Mark Twain

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language.... We have affection We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a common goal of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the case, different points of view.

Robert Hutchins