Nature Quotes

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Jacob Bronowski

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.

E.B. White

When the world has changed and the rivers run dry ad the forests grow brown will we realize that we don't run the world. We must understand that Nature is what helped us into this beautiful planet, so we must help her in return.

Veronica White

It will, of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common weal.

Edward Thorndike

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

Linda Hogan

Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

Fran Lebowitz

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture...In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Oscar Wilde

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It's natural. Nature is dark and light, birth and death. Everything and its opposite. And in nature there are predators and prey. The hunters and the hunted. The heartbreakers and the heartbroken. The beautiful thing is that Nature lets us choose which we want to be, most people never make the choice though because they don't even know they have it.

Lynn Weingarten

The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.

Robert B. Laughlin

Why does love, even such love as he claims to practise, need the spectacle of beauty to bring it to life? What, in the abstract, do shapely legs have to do with love, or for that matter with desire? Or is that just the nature of nature, about which one does not ask questions?

J. M. Coetzee

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

William Shakespeare

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

Isaac Asimov

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is so much beauty in the world, but you must allow yourself to see it.

Tom Giaquinto

I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed.

Steve Lacy

Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field the next man will appear.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

Joseph Campbell