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Nature

natural, physical, or material world and its phenomena

For personifications of nature, see the page Mother Nature; note that there may invariably be some overlap between that page and this.

Quotation
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.
~ Jane Austen
The man who follows nature and not vain opinions is independent in all things. For in reference to what is enough for nature every possession is riches, but in reference to unlimited desires even the greatest wealth is not riches but poverty. ~ Epicurus

Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers · See also · External links

A

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The capacity to contemplate . . . the harmonious elegance in Nature’s manifestations, is one of the most satisfactory experiences of which man is capable. . . . Looking at something infinitely greater than our conscious selves makes all our daily troubles appear to shrink by comparison. There is an equanimity and a peace of mind which can be achieved only through contact with the sublime.
~ Dr. Hans Seyle
  • If there's a power above us, (and that there is all nature cries aloud
    Through all her works) he must delight in virtue.
  • A world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms ... reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.
    • Theodor Adorno, “Why still philosophy?” Critical Models (1998), p. 12
  • There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.

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  • It was something new, but that doesn’t mean it was something outside Nature. It’s just something outside our understanding.
  • Nature too unkind;
    That made no medicine for a troubled mind!
  • Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes.
  • Rich with the spoils of nature.
  • There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.
  • Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature, they being both servants of his providence: art is the perfection of nature; were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos; nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
  • Look abroad through Nature's range,
    Nature's mighty law is change.

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  • Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important, simply because of his new-found power to destroy it.
    • Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College (June 1962) In Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
  • nature does indeed need protection from man; but man, too, needs protection from his own acts, for he is part of the living world. His war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. His heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth, and in time return to him.
    • Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College (June 1962) In Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment
  • But for those who can take the heat and cope with the pollen, spending more time in nature might have some surprising health benefits. In a series of studies, scientists found that when people swap their concrete confines for a few hours in more natural surroundings — forests, parks and other places with plenty of trees — they experience increased immune function.
    Stress reduction is one factor. But scientists also chalk it up to phytoncides, the airborne chemicals that plants emit to protect them from rotting and insects and which also seem to benefit humans.
  • The romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.
  • You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature, Ted. Civilization protects us from nature. Because what you see right now, all around you [referring to a tribe of cannibals] this is nature.
  • Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.
  • I am a part of all you see
    In Nature: part of all you feel    :
    I am the impact of the bee
    Upon the blossom; in the tree
    I am the sap,—that shall reveal
    The leaf, the bloom,—that flows and flutes
    Up from the darkness through its roots.
    • Madison Cawein, "Penetralia", in The Vale of Tempe (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1905), p. 133

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  • Nature knows nothing about right and wrong, good and evil, pleasure and pain; she simply acts. She creates a beautiful woman, and places a cancer on her cheek. She may create an idealist, and kill him with a germ. She creates a fine mind, and then burdens it with a deformed body. And she will create a fine body, apparently for no use whatever. She may destroy the most wonderful life when its work has just commenced. She may scatter tubercular germs broadcast throughout the world. She seemingly works with no method, plan or purpose. She knows no mercy nor goodness. Nothing is so cruel and abandoned as Nature. To call her tender or charitable is a travesty upon words and a stultification of intellect. No one can suggest these obvious facts without being told that he is not competent to judge Nature and the God behind Nature. If we must not judge God as evil, then we cannot judge God as good. In all the other affairs of life, man never hesitates to classify and judge, but when it comes to passing on life, and the responsibility of life, he is told that it must be good, although the opinion beggars reason and intelligence and is a denial of both. Emotionally, I shall no doubt act as others do to the last moment of my existence. With my last breath I shall probably try to draw another, but, intellectually, I am satisfied that life is a serious burden, which no thinking, humane person would wantonly inflict on some one else.
  • He considered himself a nature worshipper, though as far as I could tell a child was a natural object, wasn't it? Naturally produced, living and breathing, radiant with the light Nature infuses in all creation before mowing it down.
    • Kathryn Davis, Sanna in Kate Bernheimer (ed.), xo Orpheus (2013), p. 448
  • Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
  • How Strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
  • The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.
    • Rene J. Dubos, (1901-1982), The Wooing of the Earth (1980).
  • At that time I already understood that nature is never boring. If you pay attention, you will always see, hear, smell, or feel something surprising, whether you are walking around in a tropical rainforest or in your own backyard.
  • We find ourselves in the middle of nature, far from civilization, with only the sound of ticking rain and the soft call of the endemic Javan Scops Owl to fall asleep to. It doesn't get any better than this; no five-star hotel in the world can compete.
  • Why can't we all simply agree we will not touch nature? But unfortunately this is inconceivable at this moment in time, as our modern society has become too far detached from nature.
  • There is an enormous variety of things that we never dreamed of, like... black holes, pulsars, quasars, all these unbelievably active goings-on in the universe... [I]n Aristotle's time the universe... was supposed to be quiescent, it was supposed to be perfect and peaceful, and nothing ever happened in the celestial sphere; and that remained true... throughout all of the revolutions... It remained the general view of astronomers... through Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and everybody else... until just the last 30 years, and now we know it's not like that at all. In fact the universe is full of violent events, and fantastic strong gravitational fields, and collapsed objects, and huge outpourings of energy. ...The things we understand least are the quasars... the most violent and... energetic objects in the universe, and they're totally... mysterious... and... they're rather frequent; and nobody ever dreamed that they existed... [E]ven after they were found it took a long time before people took them seriously. Nature's imagination is always richer than ours.

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  • I think one of the most important trends is the awareness and willingness to embrace places and to recognize that protecting nature, the natural systems, have benefits back to us in terms not just of better health, not just because they're beautiful - it's not even a choice anymore; it's necessary for our existence. We have to realize we're a part of nature. We can see the connection between trees and climate. We can see connection between the forests and the ocean, the phytoplankton capturing carbon, generating oxygen, maintaining a planet that works in our favor. This is common sense.
  • Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable.  Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.  To that extent I am, in point of fact, religious.
    • Albert Einstein, Response to atheist Alfred Kerr in the winter of 1927, who after deriding ideas of God and religion at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Samuel Fischer, had queried him "I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious" as quoted in The Diary of a Cosmopolitan (1971) by H. G. Kessler, p. 157 London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  • Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List.
    • Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.
      • Albert Einstein, as quoted in Subtle is the Lord — The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (1982) by Abraham Pais
  • Der Glaube an eine vom wahrnehmenden Subjekt unabhängige Außenwelt liegt aller Naturwissenschaft zugrunde.
    • The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.
      • Albert Einstein
      • First sentence of "Maxwells Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der Auffassung des Physikalisch-Realen". Manuscript at the Hebrew University Jerusalem alberteinstein.info, From "Maxwell's Influence on the Evolution of the Idea of Physical Reality," 1931. Available in Einstein Archives: 65-382.
  • Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable.  I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena.  Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it.  Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics.  But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics.  Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
  • A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.  Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
    • Albert Einstein, Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972).  However, The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (Princeton University Press, 2005: ISBN 0691120749, p. 206, has a different and presumably more accurate version of this letter, which she dates to February 12, 1950 and describes as "a letter to a distraught father who had lost his young son and had asked Einstein for some comforting words":

      A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion.  Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

      Letter transcript and photograph
  • To think with fear of the end of one's life is pretty general with human beings.  It is one of the means nature uses to conserve the life of the species.  Approached rationally that fear is the most unjustified of all fears, for there is no risk of any accidents to one who is dead or not yet born.  In short, the fear is stupid but it cannot be helped.
    • Albert Einstein, Letter to Eileen Danniheisser (1953), quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Banesh Hoffman (1973), p. 261.  The exact date, or the name of his correspondent, is not given in the snippet of the book available online, but the quote appears after the letter to the Queen of Belgium from 12 January 1953, and is prefaced by "Nine months later, in words that recall the beliefs of an early atomic speculator, the Roman poet Lucretius, Einstein had written to an inquirer", followed by the quote.  The name "Eileen Danniheisser" is given in Time: Volume 144, where it is mentioned in the snippets here and here that she had written Einstein "about her obsessive thoughts of death as a child".
  • Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.  One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships.  In this effort toward logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
  • Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.
  • Never before have I lived through a storm like the one this night.  …  The sea has a look of indescribable grandeur, especially when the sun falls on it.  One feels as if one is dissolved and merged into Nature.  Even more than usual, one feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy.
  • I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of "humility." This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
  • The whole of nature is life.
    • Albert Einstein, Einstein and the Poet by William Hermanns (1983), second conversation, 1943, p. 64.
  • Wait a minute! I am not a mystic. Trying to find out the laws of nature has nothing to do with mysticism, though in the face of creation I feel very humble. It is as if a spirit is manifest infinitely superior to man's spirit. Through my pursuit in science I have known cosmic religious feelings. But I don't care to be called a mystic.
    • Albert Einstein, Einstein and the Poet by William Hermanns (1983), fourth conversation, 1954, p. 117.
  • The man who follows nature and not vain opinions is independent in all things. For in reference to what is enough for nature every possession is riches, but in reference to unlimited desires even the greatest wealth is not riches but poverty.
  • We must harness the social sciences and make them serve the people, while we coexist with nature. Authoritarians foolishly believe that it is possible to “conquer” nature, but that is not the issue. We are just one of a number of species which inhabit this planet even if we are the most intelligent. But then other species have not created nuclear weapons, started wars where millions have been killed, or engaged in discrimination against the races of their sub-species, all of which humankind has done. So who is to say which one is the most “intelligent?”

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  • Al right. I already see you turning off. I can see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it!" Tough! I don't like it either, but that's the way it is! Ok? I don't understand it either. ..."It must be that Nature knows that it's going to go up or down." No, it must not be that nature knows! We are not to tell Nature what she's gotta be! That's what we found out. Every time we take a guess as how she's got to be, and go and measure... She's clever. She's always got better imagination than we have, and she finds a cleverer way to do it than we have thought of. And in this particular case, the clever way to do it is by probability, by odds.
  • All nature wears one universal grin.
  • In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.
    • Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. p. 35
  • Laughing at mankind is rather weary rot, I think. We shall never meet with anyone nicer. Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair. She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.
    • E. M. Forster, Selected Letters: Letter 57, to Arthur Cole (7 July 1905).
  • We speak erroneously of “artificial” materials, “synthetics”, and so forth. The basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has made certain things which we call natural, and everything else is “man-made”, ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is find out what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember that.
    • Buckminster Fuller, "The Comprehensive Man", Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (1963), 75-76.
  • Nature! Nature in which there is no deceit! Simple and free, you do not warp a person’s soul as humans do.
  • And so, the endless circle of life comes to an end, meaningless and grim. Why did they live, and why did they die? No reason.

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  • I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature — a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation.
  • Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion?
  • 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).
  • Every operation in nature is in the shortest, best ordered, briefest, and best possible way.
    • Robert Grossteste De iride published in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, IX (1912) pp.74-75 as quoted in Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)

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  • In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. ... Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
    • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3, p. 21

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  • Peter said: What is the sin of the world?
    The Savior said: there is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called sin.
    That is why the Good came into your midst, to the essence of every nature in order to restore it to its root.
    Then He continued and said, That is why you become sick and die, for you are deprived of the one who can heal you.

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  • Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit.
    • You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.
    • Horace (65-8 BC), Epistles I.X.24.
  • Nature is today more than ever conceived as a mere tool of man. It is the object of total exploitation that has no aim set by reason, and therefore no limit. Man’s boundless imperialism is never satisfied. The dominion of the human race over the earth has no parallel in those epochs of natural history in which other animal species represented the highest forms of organic development. Their appetites were limited by the necessities of their physical existence. Indeed, man’s avidity to extend his power in two infinities, the microcosm and the universe, does not arise directly from his own nature, but from the structure of society. Just as attacks of imperialistic nations on the rest of the world must be explained on the basis of their internal struggles rather than in terms of their so-called national character, so the totalitarian attack of the human race on anything that it excludes from itself derives from interhuman relationships rather than from innate human qualities. The warfare among men in war and in peace is the key to the insatiability of the species and to its ensuing practical attitudes, as well as to the categories and methods of scientific intelligence in which nature appears increasingly under the aspect of its most effective exploitation.
  • In the name of Nature the enlightened Holbach calls for the defense of one’s country not only against external enemies but against internal tyrants. But what does he mean by “Nature"? There is nothing outside her; she is one and all at once. Man shall discover her laws, admire her inexhaustible energy, use his discoveries for his own happiness, and resign himself to his ignorance of her last, her ultimate causes which are impenetrable. With his whole being man belongs to her. The abstract entity which, according to such materialists, forms the basis of right conduct is as indeterminate as the Deus absconditus of the Protestants, and the promise of happiness in this world is as problematical as bliss in the next, which is extremely uncertain. The naturalistic doctrine agrees with the theological doctrine it opposes in identifying what is most permanent and powerful with what is most exalted and worthy of love — as if this were a matter of course.
    • Max Horkheimer, “Theism and Atheism” (1963), in Critique of Instrumental Reason (1974).

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  • The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.
    • Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Saturday Review (8 June 1963).
  • The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
    • Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Today and All Its Yesterdays (1958).

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  • My philosophy isn’t only not conducive to misanthropy, as it might appear to a superficial reader, and as many have accused me. It essentially rules out misanthropy, it tends toward healing, to dissolving discontent and hatred. Not knee-jerk hatred but the deep-dyed hatred that unreflective people who would deny being misanthropes so cordially bear (habitually or on select occasions) toward their own kind in response to hurts they receive—as we all do, justly or not—from others. My philosophy holds nature guilty of everything, it acquits mankind completely and directs our hate, or at least our lamentations, to its matrix, to the true origin of the afflictions living creatures suffer, etc.
    • Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (1898) (January 2, 1829). Translation by W. S. Di Piero.
  • Nature has no more esteem
    or care for the seed of man
    than for the ant
    • Giacomo Leopardi, La ginestra (The broom or The desert flower) (1836). Translation by Jonathan Galassi. Canti: Poems (1835)
  • A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again.
  • In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.
  • A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability. "One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever."

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  • The primary characteristic of the creations of nature is power accompanied by an economy of means. Everything being in its place, there are no jerks or bumps, friction is low, and there is no noise, only majestic silence. So it is that in the mechanism of nature, perfect balance, equilibrium, and exact symmetry of parts give even rapid movement the satisfying appearance of repose.
  • Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous.
  • When once this phraseology was introduced, the poets and mythologists soon took hold of it, and made it subservient to their purposes. Nature was personified: the phrase law of Nature, which originally meant no more than a law for the regulation of Nature, or of the natural world, became a law laid down by the goddess Nature to be obeyed by her creatures. From the poets, this fictitious personage speedily penetrated into the closets of the philosopher, and hence arose the error of attributing a creative power to nature. To make any use of this word, in the explanation of the material phenomena, is only substituting for rational scepticism, a mystical and poetical kind of Theism. Of course, the arguments which serve to explode the belief in an ante-material and intelligent Being, will also suffice to destroy the unmeaning word Nature.
  • In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. [...] The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them.
    • John Stuart Mill, “On Nature” in Nature, The Utility of Religion and Theism, Rationalist Press, 1904.

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Smarter
Just 20 minutes in nature improves concentration and reduces the need for ADHD and ADD medications in children. Walking through nature also improves cognitive function and memory. These benefits can greatly improve performance in school.
Stronger
Exercising in nature leads to greater health benefits than performing the same activity indoors. Individuals are more likely to repeat being physically active when the exercise is performed in a natural environment. Communities that are closer to nature are more likely to have stronger ties with their community members.
Healthier
A 30-minute visit to a park can improve heart health, circulation and lower cholesterol, blood glucose, and blood pressure. Walking in nature reduces inflammation and boosts your immune system, which decreases the risk of certain diseases and cancers. Interacting with a green space increases social interactions which can prevent diseases like dementia. ~ National Park Service
  • Smarter
    Just 20 minutes in nature improves concentration and reduces the need for ADHD and ADD medications in children. Walking through nature also improves cognitive function and memory. These benefits can greatly improve performance in school.
    Stronger
    Exercising in nature leads to greater health benefits than performing the same activity indoors. Individuals are more likely to repeat being physically active when the exercise is performed in a natural environment. Communities that are closer to nature are more likely to have stronger ties with their community members.
    Healthier
    A 30-minute visit to a park can improve heart health, circulation and lower cholesterol, blood glucose, and blood pressure. Walking in nature reduces inflammation and boosts your immune system, which decreases the risk of certain diseases and cancers. Interacting with a green space increases social interactions which can prevent diseases like dementia.
    Listening to birdsongs and observing animals in nature have shown to promote wellbeing, reduce stress, improve mood, and reduce attention fatigue. Natural aromas from wood and plants have calming effects and viewing nature reduces mental fatigue.
    Happier
    5 minutes walking in nature improves mood, self-esteem, and relaxation. Frequent exposure to nature reduces anxiety and depression, while promoting a sense of wellbeing and fulfillment. Physical activity in a green space can reduce stress and lowers cortisol levels by 15%.
    More Productive
    Physical activity in a green space can improve cognitive control, short and long-term memory and overall brain function. Children who walk 20 minutes in a park concentrate in school longer and have better participation. The mental and attention restoration achieved from walking in nature can improve performance on tasks in school and at work. Exercising in nature leads to greater health benefits than performing the same activity indoors.
    Views of nature in work or school increase direct attention, well being and life satisfaction. They also increase working memory and concentration. Living within 1/2 mile of a green space decreases mental distress and anxiety, while boosting heart and metabolic health.
  • The modern scientific counterpart to belief in God is the belief in the universe as an organism: this disgusts me. This is to make what is quite rare and extremely derivative, the organic, which we perceive only on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal, and eternal! This is still an anthropomorphizing of nature!

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  • There's nothing that tastes of death more than the summer sun, the powerful light, exuberant nature. You sniff the air and listen to the woods and know that the plants and animals don't give a damn about you. Everything lives and consumes itself. Nature is death...
  • When man tries to fight nature, he invariably loses. Nature invariably wins. It is only when man is wise enough to live with nature that he really gets anywhere.
    • Elmer T. Peterson, Cities Are Abnormal (1946).
  • No matter how beautiful the natural world, we should remember that it is always conspiring to starve, sicken, and kill us, and that if we lacked the protective shield constituted by Culture as Security we would be devoured by wild animals, frozen by blizzards, prostrated by the heat of the desert, and starved by the fact that food does not simply manifest itself for our delectation.
  • The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on.
    • Steven Pinker, “Q&A: Steven Pinker of ‘Blank Slate’” United Press International. 30 Oct. 2002.
  • [I]t behooves Us above all else to call to mind that firmly established principle, esteemed alike in sound philosophy and sacred theology: namely, that whatever things have deviated from their right order cannot be brought back to that original state which is in harmony with their [[nature except by returning to the divine plan which, as the Angelic Doctor teaches, is the exemplar of all right order.
    Wherefore, Our Predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, attacked the doctrine of the naturalists in these words: "It is a divinely appointed law that whatsoever things are constituted by God, the Author of nature, these we find the more useful and salutary, the more they remain in their natural state, unimpaired and unchanged inasmuch as God, the Creator of all things, intimately knows what is suited to the constitution and the preservation of each, and by His will and mind has so ordained all things that each may duly achieve its purpose. But if the boldness and wickedness of men change and disturb this order of things, so providentially disposed, then indeed things so wonderfully ordained will begin to be injurious, or will cease to be beneficial, either because in the change they have lost their power to benefit, or because God Himself is thus pleased to draw down chastisement on the pride and presumption of men.”
  • Nature is the grandest warehouse discovered on this planet.
  • Green is Nature's favourite colour.
    • Graham D Priest (1939-) in Poems.

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  • …it is logically absurd to want to defend the environment by making humans suffer for this. In fact, the environment is for humans. As there can be no humans if the natural environment is inhospitable to life, an environment with no humans is not what all of us are interested in. …To function properly, [the society] needs to cherish the unalienable reality of its members. If someone considers a fellow human being or a group of humans or the whole of humanity as an enemy, a virus or a disease to be extirpated, societies become terrestrial hells. …From Tai Ji Men’s teachings one can in fact easily draw the idea that there can be no real care for the environment if there is no conscientious care for humans.
  • We might have a chance now to rebuild it all with what we have left. We might have learned that we can exist only as a part of nature, not apart from nature.
  • The more you observe nature, the more you perceive that there is tremendous organization in all things. It is an intelligence so great that just by observing natural phenomena I come to the conclusion that a Creator exists.
    • Carlo Rubbia
    • Note: The Brazilian magazine Veja asked Carlo Rubbia, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, “Do you believe in God?
    • Source: Evolution Is Not a Fact, Awake! magazine, 1998, 8/8.
  • Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
    • William Ruckelshaus, first EPA Administrator, (1970-1973 and 1983-1985), Business Week (18 June 1990).
  • Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.

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  • Nature ... is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
  • The capacity to contemplate . . . the harmonious elegance in Nature’s manifestations, is one of the most satisfactory experiences of which man is capable. . . . Looking at something infinitely greater than our conscious selves makes all our daily troubles appear to shrink by comparison. There is an equanimity and a peace of mind which can be achieved only through contact with the sublime.
    • Dr. Hans Selye, one of the giants in the study of stress. Cited in Awake! magazine 1980, 10/30.
  • I realized that while women may seem like regular individuals, mothers are nothing short of divine embodiment. They transcend the ordinary, not only navigating life's challenges but also contending with the forces of nature in relentless devotion to their children.
  • [T]o anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.
  • A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.
  • Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age.  Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs.  These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man.  Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten.  Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.
  • If justice be not a natural principle, it is no principle at all.  If it be not a natural principle, there is no such thing as justice.  If it be not a natural principle, all that men have ever said or written about it, from time immemorial, has been said and written about that which had no existence.  If it be not a natural principle, all the appeals for justice that have ever been heard, and all the struggles for justice that have ever been witnessed, have been appeals and struggles for a mere fantasy, a vagary of the imagination, and not for a reality.

    If justice be not a natural principle, then there is no such thing as injustice; and all the crimes of which the world has been the scene, have been no crimes at all; but only simple events, like the falling of the rain, or the setting of the sun; events of which the victims had no more reason to complain than they had to complain of the running of the streams, or the growth of vegetation.

    If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognizance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance of it, than they have to take cognizance, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance, of any other nonentity; and all their professions of establishing justice, or of maintaining justice, or of rewarding justice, are simply the mere gibberish of fools, or the frauds of imposters.

    But if justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one; and can no more be changed—by any power inferior to that which established it—than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men—whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name—to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe.

    If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science.  And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation.

  • If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.

    On the other hand, if there be no such principle as justice, or natural law, then every human being came into the world utterly destitute of rights; and coming into the world destitute of rights, he must necessarily forever remain so.  For if no one brings any rights with him into the world, clearly no one can ever have any rights of his own, or give any to another.  And the consequence would be that mankind could never have any rights; and for them to talk of any such things as their rights, would be to talk of things that never had, never will have, and never can have any existence.

  • If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be.  All the other so-called political principles, which men are in the habit of inventing, are not principles at all.  They are either the mere conceits of simpletons, who imagine they have discovered something better than truth, and justice, and universal law; or they are mere devices and pretences, to which selfish and knavish men resort as means to get fame, and power, and money.

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  • Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
    The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
    And murmuring of innumerable bees.
  • Who trusted God was love indeed
    And love Creation's final law —
    Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
    With ravine, shriek'd against his creed —
  • I care not, Fortune, what you me deny;
    You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace,
    You cannot shut the windows of the sky,
    Through which Aurora shows her brightening face    ;
    You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
    The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve.
  • O nature! * * *
    Enrich me with the knowledge of thy works;
    Snatch me to Heaven.
  • Rocks rich in gems, and Mountains big with mines,
    That on the high Equator, ridgy, rise,
    Whence many a bursting Stream auriferous plays.
  • Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots.

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A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
~ Leonardo da Vinci
  • Qu’est-ce que la tolérance? c’est l’apanage de l’humanité. Nous sommes tous pétris de faiblesses et d’erreurs; pardonnons-nous réciproquement nos sottises, c’est la première loi de la nature.
    • What is tolerance?  It is the consequence of humanity.  We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly—that is the first law of nature.
  • Nature is infallible and is the voice of God, with this difference, that the language of the Holy Scripture can and should be interpreted in many ways (otherwise it would say many things contrary to the evidence of the senses), but the language of Nature is always the same, without metaphor, without allegory, without hyperbole, without doubtful, obscure, mysterious meanings. Nature speaks clearly to him who knows how to understand her, and has no need of interpretation.
  • Why did nature not ordain that one animal should not live by the death of another? Nature, being inconstant and taking pleasure in creating and making constantly new lives and forms, because she knows that her terrestrial materials become thereby augmented, is more ready and more swift in her creating, than time in his destruction; and so she has ordained that many animals shall be food for others. Nay, this not satisfying her desire, to the same end she frequently sends forth certain poisonous and pestilential vapours upon the vast increase and congregation of animals; and most of all upon men, who increase vastly because other animals do not feed upon them; and, the causes being removed, the effects would not follow. This earth therefore seeks to lose its life, desiring only continual reproduction; and as, by the argument you bring forward and demonstrate, like effects always follow like causes, animals are the image of the world.
  • A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

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  • Calvin: That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you. Let's go watch TV.
  • Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
  • To be in direct contact with nature and not with men is the only discipline. To be dependent on an alien will is to be a slave. This, however, is the fate of all men. The slave is dependent on the master and the master on the slave. This is a situation which makes us either servile or tyrannical or both at once (omnia serviliter pro dominatione). On the contrary, when we are face to face with inert nature our only resource is to think.
  • The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.
  • Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative.
    • H.G. Wells (1866-1946), Mind at the End of Its Tether, 1945.
  • The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
    • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry to Dorian, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ch. 2, pp. 28-29
  • To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
    • Terry Tempest Williams, testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Forest & Public Lands Management regarding the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 (Washington, D.C., 13 July 1995), published in Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (2001), page 75.
  • Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
  • Nature never did betray
    The Heart that Loved her.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 544-48.
  • No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature.
  • Nature's great law, and law of all men's minds?—
    To its own impulse every creature stirs;
    Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!
  • At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,
    And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
    When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
    And nought but the nightingale's song in the grove.
  • I trust in Nature for the stable laws
    Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
    And Autumn garner to the end of time.
    I trust in God—the right shall be the right
    And other than the wrong, while he endures;
    I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
    The outward and the inward, Nature's good
    And God's.
  • To him who in the love of Nature holds
    Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
    A various language.
  • See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, Section 2. Memb. 4. Subsec. 7.
  • Nature vicarye of the Almighty Lord.
  • Not without art, but yet to Nature true.
  • Ab interitu naturam abhorrere.
    • Nature abhors annihilation.
    • Cicero, De Finibus, V. 11. 3.
  • Meliora sunt ea quæ natura quam illa quæ arte perfecta sunt.
    • Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art.
    • Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II. 34.
  • Nature, exerting an unwearied power,
    Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
    Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads
    The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.
  • Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds,
    Exhilarate the spirit, and restore
    The tone of languid Nature.
  • What is bred in the bone will not come out of the flesh.
    • Quoted by DeFoe, Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
  • Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop.
    • Drive the natural away, it returns at a gallop.
    • Philippe Néricault Destouches, Glorieux, IV, 3. Idea in La Fontaine, Fables, Book II. 18. Chassez les prejugés par la porte, ils rentreront par la fenêtre. As used by Frederick the Great, Letter to Voltaire (19 March 1771).
  • Whate'er he did, was done with so much ease,
    In him alone 't was natural to please.
    • John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Part I, line 27.
  • By viewing nature, nature's handmaid, art,
    Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow;
    Thus fishes first to shipping did impart,
    Their tail the rudder, and their head the prow.
  • For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.
  • Ever charming, ever new,
    When will the landscape tire the view?
  • Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
  • By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave
    One scent to hyson and to wall-flower,
    One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls,
    One aspect to the desert and the lake.
    It was her stern necessity: all things
    Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower,
    Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character
    Deceive us, seeming to be many things,
    And are but one.
  • Nature seems to wear one universal grin.
  • As distant prospects please us, but when near
    We find but desert rocks and fleeting air.
  • To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
    One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
  • E'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
    E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
  • What Nature has writ with her lusty wit
    Is worded so wisely and kindly
    That whoever has dipped in her manuscript
    Must up and follow her blindly.
    Now the summer prime is her blithest rhyme
    In the being and the seeming,
    And they that have heard the overword
    Know life's a dream worth dreaming.
  • That undefined and mingled hum,
    Voice of the desert never dumb!
  • Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurrit.
    • You may turn nature out of doors with violence, but she will still return.
    • Horace, Epistles, I. 10. 24. ( Expelles in some versions).
  • Nunquam aliud Natura aliud Sapientia dicit.
    • Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), XIV. 321.
  • No stir of air was there,
    Not so much life as on a summer's day
    Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
    But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
  • O what a glory doth this world put on
    For him who, with a fervent heart, goes forth
    Under the bright and glorious sky, and looks
    On duties well performed, and days well spent!
    For him the wind, ay, and the yellow leaves,
    Shall have a voice, and give him eloquent teachings.
  • And Nature, the old nurse, took
    The child upon her knee,
    Saying: Here is a story-book
    Thy Father has written for thee.

    Come, wander with me, she said,
    Into regions yet untrod;
    And read what is still unread
    In the manuscripts of God.
  • So Nature deals with us, and takes away
    Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
    Leads us to rest so gently, that we go,
    Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
    Being too full of sleep to understand
    How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
  • Nature with folded hands seemed there,
    Kneeling at her evening prayer!
  • I'm what I seem; not any dyer gave,
    But nature dyed this colour that I have.
    • Martial, Epigrams (c. 80-104 AD), Book XIV, Epigram 133. Translation by Wright.
  • But on and up, where Nature's heart
    Beats strong amid the hills.
  • Beldam Nature.
    • John Milton, At a Vacation Exercise in the College, 1. 48.
  • Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
    With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
    Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
    Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
    But all to please and sate the curious taste?
  • And live like Nature's bastards, not her sons.
  • Into this wild abyss,
    The womb of Nature and perhaps her grave.
  • Thus with the year
    Seasons return, but not to me returns
    Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
    Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
    Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
    But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
    Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
    Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
    Presented with a universal blank
    Of Nature's works to me expunged and rased,
    And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
  • Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;
    Do thou but thine!
  • Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.
  • And not from Nature up to Nature's God,
    But down from Nature's God look Nature through.
  • There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
    As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet.
  • And we, with Nature's heart in tune,
    Concerted harmonies.
  • Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
    And catch the manners living as they rise.
  • Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
    My footstool Earth, my canopy the skies.
  • All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
    Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
    That chang'd thro' all, and yet in all the same,
    Great in the earth as in th' ethereal frame;
    Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
    Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees;
    Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent,
    Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
    Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
    As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.
  • See plastic Nature working to this end,
    The single atoms each to other tend,
    Attract, attracted to, the next in place
    Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.
  • Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
    But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.
    • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733-34), Epistle IV, line 331. (Verbatim from Bolingbroke—Letters to Pope, according to Warton).
  • Ut natura dedit, sic omnis recta figura.
  • Naturæ sequitur semina quisque suæ.
    • Every one follows the inclinations of his own nature.
    • Sextus Propertius, Elegiæ, III. 9. 20.
  • Modern readers find several of Aristotle’s views deeply repugnant. The two most obvious are his views on slavery and his views on the intellectual and political capacity of women. Unsurprisingly, these are connected. The relation of master to inferior—of the male head of household to wife and slaves—is a basic and natural human relationship.
    • Alan Ryan, On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 3 : Aristotle: Politics Is Not Philosophy
  • Der Schein soll nie die Wirklichkeit erreichen
    Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen.
    • The ideal should never touch the real;
      When nature conquers, Art must then give way.
    • Schiller. To Goethe when he put Voltaire's Mahomet on the Stage, Stanza 6.
  • Some touch of Nature's genial glow.
  • Oh, Brignall banks are wild and fair,
    And Greta woods are green,
    And you may gather garlands there
    Would grace a summer queen.
  • To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to Nature; to shew virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
  • And Nature does require
    Her times of preservation, which perforce
    I, her frail son, amongst my brethren mortal,
    Must give my tendance to.
  • My banks they are furnish'd with bees,
    Whose murmur invites one to sleep;
    My grottoes are shaded with trees,
    And my hills are white over with sheep.
  • Yet neither spinnes, nor cards, ne cares nor fretts,
    But to her mother Nature all her care she letts.
  • For all that Nature by her mother-wit
    Could frame in earth.
    • Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1589-96), Book IV, Canto X, Stanza 21.
  • What more felicitie can fall to creature
    Than to enjoy delight with libertie,
    And to be lord of all the workes of Nature,
    To raine in th' aire from earth to highest skie,
    To feed on flowres and weeds of glorious feature.
  • Once, when the days were ages,
    And the old Earth was young,
    The high gods and the sages
    From Nature's golden pages
    Her open secrets wrung.
  • A voice of greeting from the wind was sent;
    The mists enfolded me with soft white arms;
    The birds did sing to lap me in content,
    The rivers wove their charms,—
    And every little daisy in the grass
    Did look up in my face, and smile to see me pass!
  • In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.
  • Talk not of temples, there is one
    Built without hands, to mankind given;
    Its lamps are the meridian sun
    And all the stars of heaven,
    Its walls are the cerulean sky,
    Its floor the earth so green and fair,
    The dome its vast immensity
    All Nature worships there!
  • La Nature a toujours été en cux plus forte que l'education.
    • Nature has always had more force than education.
    • Voltaire, Life of Molière.
  • And recognizes ever and anon
    The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul.
  • Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man,
    Could field or grove, could any spot of earth,
    Show to his eye an image of the pangs
    Which it hath witnessed; render back an echo
    Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!
  • The streams with softest sound are flowing,
    The grass you almost hear it growing,
    You hear it now, if e'er you can.
  • Nature never did betray
    The heart that loved her.
  • As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
    So in the eye of Nature let him die!
  • The stars of midnight shall be dear
    To her; and she shall lean her ear
    In many a secret place
    Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
    And beauty born of murmuring sound
    Shall pass into her face.
  • To the solid ground
    Of Nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye.
  • I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than "Mother Nature" was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilisation. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by 'Mother Nature.' Each species must strive to survive, and that will do, by every means in its power, however foul—unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.
  • Such blessings Nature pours,
    O'erstock'd mankind enjoy but half her stores.
    In distant wilds, by human eyes unseen,
    She rears her flowers, and spreads her velvet green;
    Pure gurgling rills the lonely desert trace
    And waste their music on the savage race.
  • Nothing in Nature, much less conscious being,
    Was e'er created solely for itself.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IX, line 711.
  • The course of nature governs all!
    The course of nature is the heart of God.
    The miracles thou call'st for, this attest;
    For say, could nature nature's course control?
    But, miracles apart, who sees Him not?
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IX, line 1,280.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

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Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
  • Every object in nature is impressed with God's footsteps, and every day repeats the wonders of creation. There is not an object, be it pebble or pearl, weed or rose, the flower-spangled sward beneath, or the star-spangled sky above, not a worm or an angel, a drop of water or a boundless ocean, in which intelligence may not discern, and piety adore, the providence of Him who took our nature that He might save our souls.
  • If we can hear the voice of God in all sounds, see the sweep of His will in all motions, catch hints of His taste in all beauty, follow the reach of His imagination in all heights and distances, and trace the delicate ministry of His love in all the little graces and utilities that spring and blossom about us as thick as the grass, we shall tread God's world with reverent feet as if it were a temple. The pure and solemn eyes of the indwelling soul will look forth upon us from every thing which His hands have made. Nature will be to us, not some dark tissue of cloth of mystery flowing from some unseen loom, but a vesture of light in which God has enrobed Himself; and with worshipful fingers we shall rejoice to touch even the hem of His garment.
  • When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature — when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all.
  • We might almost accuse nature of falsehood. One sees himself behind a mirror when nothing is there. A straight pole leaning in a pool is bent to appearance. The sun seems to rise and set, but moves not at all. We see it before it rises and after it sets. These and numberless other cases might be adduced to prove the deceitfulness of nature. Nay, they prove rather that education policy is the law of our being, and that here, as elsewhere, he who would not be self-deceived, must study nature's laws, must become educated.
  • Vast chain of being! which from God began,
    Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
    Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
    No glass can reach, from infinite to Thee,
    From Thee to nothing.
  • I hold that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the works of nature till we view them as works of God,— not only as works of mechanism, but works of intelligence, not only as under laws, but under a Lawgiver, wise and good.
  • So distinguished by a Divine wisdom, power, and goodness, are God's works of creation and providence, that all nature, by the gentle voices of her skies and streams, of her fields and forests, as well as by the roar of breakers, the crash of thunder, the rumbling earthquake, the fiery volcano, and the destroying hurricane, echoes the closing sentences of this angel hymn, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, the whole earth is full of His glory!
  • There's nothing bright above, below,
    From flowers that bloom, to stars that glow,
    But in its light my soul can see
    Some feature of Thy Deity.
  • All things and all acts and this whole wonderful universe proclaim to us the Lord our Father, Christ our love, Christ our hope, our portion, and our joy. Oh, brethren, if you would know the meaning of the world, read Christ in it. If you would see the beauty of earth, take it for a prophet of something higher than itself.
  • These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
    Are but the varied God. The rolling year
    Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
    Thy beauty walks, Thy tenderness and love.
  • It is well to be in places where man is little, and God is great,— where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process.
  • The best thing is to go from nature's God down to nature; and if you once get to nature's God, and believe Him, and love Him, it is surprising how easy it is to hear music in the waves, and songs in the wild whisperings of the winds; to see God everywhere in the stones, in the rocks, in the rippling brooks, and hear Him everywhere, in the lowing of cattle, in the rolling of thunder, and in the fury of tempests. Get Christ first, put Him in the right place, and you will find Him to be the wisdom of God in your own experience.
  • Only let us love God, and then nature will compass us about like a cloud of Divine witnesses; and all influences from the earth, and things on the earth, will be ministers of God to do us good. Only let there be God within us, and then every thing outside us will become a godlike help.
  • The very voices of the night, sounding like the moan of the tempest, may turn out to be the disguised yet tender voices of God, calling away from all earthly footsteps, to mount with greater singleness of eye and ardor of aim the alone ladder of safety and peace — upward, onward, heavenward, homeward.
  • God is infinite; and the laws of nature, like nature itself, are finite. These methods of working, therefore, — which correspond to the physical element in us, — do not exhaust His agency. There is a boundless residue of disengaged energy beyond.
  • Call nature the grand revelation! Is it more to go to nature and know it than to know God? Are there deeper depths in nature, higher sublimities, thoughts more captivating and glorious? In the mineral and vegetable shapes are there finer themes than in the life of Jesus? In the storms and glorious pilings of the clouds, are there manifestations of greatness and beauty more impressive than in the tragic sceneries of the cross? Nature is the realm of things, the supernatural is the realm of powers.

See also

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