Nature Quotes

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Socrates called beauty a short - Lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; Aristotle, that it was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world; Homer, that it was a glorious gift of nature; and Ovid, that it was favor bestowed by the gods.

Francis Quarles

His life was gentle and the elements So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up, And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN.

William Shakespeare

All art is but imitation of nature.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Elisha Potte

This is the true nature of home - - It is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.

John Ruskin

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.

Jacob Brownowski

Engineering is the science of economy, of conserving the energy, kinetic and potential, provided and stored up by nature for the use of man. It is the business of engineering to utilize this energy to the best advantage, so that there may be the least possible waste.

William A. Smith, 1908

Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.

Thomas Paine

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Aristotle, Politics

There is no place in nature for extinction.

Licretius

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore.

Henry Ward Beeche

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Henry Kissinge

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

Mere

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

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle

When a miracle happens, even if not to you, its nature is to naturally expand. You can almost feel the warmth on your face.

Hugh Elliott

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

Erich Fromm

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

If nature made you a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart. And though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that.

Frances Burnett

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance the more we feel how much remains unknown.

Humphrey Davy

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - Instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.

Dale Carnegie

It is written on the arched sky It looks out from every star It is the poetry of Nature It is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

John Ruskin

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

Cicero

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

Francis Bacon

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Henry David Thoreau

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit. You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.

Horace

This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy.

Susan Polis Schutz

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

John Updike

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

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.

Jane Austen, Emma

Nature made him, and then broke the mold.

Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso

In the next year or so, my signature will appear on 60 billion of United States currency. More important to me, however, is the signature that appears on my life - The strong, proud, assertive handwriting of a loving father and mother.

Katherine D. Ortega