Nature Quotes

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 H. Huxley

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

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

E. B. White

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Only a novel... in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

A misery is not to be measure from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.

Joseph Addison

Engineering is the practice of safe and economic application of the scientific laws governing the forces and materials of nature by means of organization, design and construction, for the general benefit of mankind.

S. E. Lindsay, 1920

Many difficulties which nature throws in our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence.

Titus Livius

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Unknown

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra".

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

Miguel de Cervantes

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

Nature made him, and then broke the mold.

Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso

I am at two with nature.

Woody Allen

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

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Edmund Burke

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.

Samuel Smiles

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

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

Nature loves a burst of energy.

Boe Lightman

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

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

Eleanor Roosevelt

No form of Nature is inferior to Art for the arts merely imitate natural forms.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

It is human nature to hate him whom you have injured.

Tacitus

Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.

Macneile Dixon

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

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

Tacitus

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson

Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives.

Mary Ann Brussat

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

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 26, 1978

Experience is the comb that nature gives us when we are bald.

Belgian Prove

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

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality.... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana

Nature is the most thrifty thing in the world; she never wastes anything; she undergoes change, but there is no annihilation, the essence remains - Matter is eternal.

Horace Binney

It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.

Albert Camus