Nature Quotes

The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.

John F. Kennedy

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

Joseph Conrad

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Aristotle, Metaphysics

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

Belgian Prove

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

Cicero

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

California Civil Code, "Maxims of Jurisprudence".

For those who intend to discover and to understand, not to indulge in conjectures and soothsaying, and rather than contrive imitation and fabulous worlds plan to look deep into the nature of the real world and to dissect it - - For them everything must be sought in things themselves.

Francis Bacon

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

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding.

Jacob Brownowski

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Interview, April 30, 1978

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

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better we find comfort somewhere.

Jane Austen

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

John Burroughs

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

Tacitus

The most enviable writers are those who, quite often unanalytically and unconsciously, have realized that there are different facets to their nature and are able to live and work with now one, now another, in the ascendant.

Dorothea Brande

A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

Joseph Addison

Nature has perfection, in order to show that she is the image of God and defects, to show that she is only his image.

Blaise Pascal

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that eve.

Galileo Galilei

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 our responsibility.

Arnold J. Toynbee

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

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - - Trees, flowers, grass - - Grows in silence see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... we need silence to be able to touch souls.

Mother Theresa

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

Mere

True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Hugh Blai

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

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

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

Miguel de Cervantes, Exemplary Novels (1613)

Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.

William Wordsworth

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

Mark Twain

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

In nature there are neither rewards not punishments - - There are consequences.

Robert Green Ingersoll

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

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

James A. Autry

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

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

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Charles Baudelaire