Nature Quotes

Things happen according to the ordinary course of nature and the ordinary habits of life.

California Civil Code, "Maxims of Jurisprudence".

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Thomas Huxley

Equation 1. 2 - 9 is a second order, nonlinear, vector, differential equation which has defied solution in its present form. It is here therefore we depart from the realities of nature to make some simplifying assumptions...

Bate, Mueller & White, 1971, "Fundamentals of Astrodynamics".

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore.

Henry Ward Beeche

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

Mere

Nature is the glass reflecting God, as by the sea reflected is the sun, too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere.

Brigham Young

We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", Science V. 155 No. 3767 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203 - 1207.

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

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

Joseph Conrad

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely... but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at every attitude...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

George Santayana

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.

A. J. Toynbee

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

Henry David Thoreau

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

Dietrich Bonhoeffe

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

Francis Bacon

I will go further, and assert that nature without culture can often do more to deserve praise than culture without nature.

Cicero

Nature does not proceed by leaps.

Linnaeus

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

Different people have different duties assigned to them by Nature Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, and the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.

Henrik Ibsen

Man... is a tame or civilized animal never the less, he requires proper instruction and a fortunate nature, and then of all animals he becomes the most divine and most civilized but if he be insufficiently or ill - Educated he is the most savage of earthly creatures.

Plato

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

Nikita Khrushchev

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.

Alfred Tennyson

A brother is a friend given by Nature.

Legouve

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

Unknown

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Marcus Aureluis

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature - - - And another woman to help him forget them.

Helen Rowland

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Aldous Huxley

Human subtelty will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Leonardo DaVinci

Nature does not give to those who will not spend.

R. J. Baughan

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

Sallust

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed.

Solomon Short

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

Thomas Paine

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

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.

Voltaire

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

George Gordon Byron

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

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

Jose Ortega y Gasset