quotations about nature
Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY
Festus
All nature ... is a respiration
Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter
Will inhale it into his bosom again,
So that nothing but God alone will remain.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The Golden Legend
The inexorable ticking of the clock is like the throb of pain to sensations made keen by sickening fear. And so it is with the great clockwork of nature. Daisies and buttercups give way to the brown waving grasses, tinged with the warm red sorrel; the waving grasses are swept away, and the meadows lie like emeralds set in the bushy hedgerows; the tawny-tipped corn begins to bow with the weight of the full ear; the reapers are bending amongst it, and it soon stands in sheaves; then, presently the patches of yellow stubble lie side by side with streaks of dark-red earth, which the plough is turning up in preparation for the new-thrashed seed. And this passage from beauty to beauty, which to the happy is like the flow of a melody, measures for many a human heart the approach of foreseen anguish--seems hurrying on the moment when the shadow of dread will be followed up by the reality of despair.
GEORGE ELIOT
Mr. Gilfil's Love Story
Mankind, which has always been a part of nature, has reached a point where it is too much for nature to accommodate.
KOBO ABE
The Green Stockings
Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!
BERTOLT BRECHT
The Exception and the Rule
Nature admits no lie.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Latter-Day Pamphlets
Nature is a library of divine thoughts to the spiritualized mind.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
The volume of Nature is the book of knowledge.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Citizen of the World
It were happy if we studied Nature more in natural things; and acted according to Nature; whose rules are few, plain and most reasonable.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
GEORGE ELIOT
The Mill on the Floss
All things bend to help the man
Who seeks to harmonize
His own free will with nature's plan,
And prove himself most wise.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Destiny"
What people call defying nature is usually no more than human beings trying to stop its most harmful effects. This is not hubris, but a justified attempt to reduce suffering and improve the conditions for human life. It is why people put roofs on their homes, purify their water, or use mechanical transport to shrink the otherwise limiting aspects of distance. No one would object to these things, but still many have a sense that sometimes we go too far. But what is too far? It is surely not a matter of technological sophistication. An elaborate technology that cured cancer, for instance, would be welcomed, not rejected for being excessively artificial.
JULIAN BAGGINI
"Nature is not evil, simply amoral", The Independent, March 14, 2011
Mid-summer ... when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Tomb"
As an authoress Nature is open to criticism, for her Book hath neither beginning, middle, nor end.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
Nature with her wealth of birds and flowers,
Has in her heart a place for every weed;
For her quick eyes require no microscope
To note the varied wonders and delights
That the Creator's humblest works possess.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Nature"
There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
The Forsyte Saga
Nature abhors a vacuum.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.
HORACE
Epistles
Nature is astonishingly prolific, but it is a prodigal process going nowhere special, sponsored by destruction and suffering. What is wonderful and inspiring is the possibility of infinite variation and exquisite adaptation; what is daunting and terrible is the cost. Nature is abundant and unremittingly cruel from, as it were, a personal point of view.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Darwin's Worms On Life Stories and Death Stories
If in studying the works and laws of Nature, we are walking with its great Author and Sustainer, then we behold this department of truth as He beholds it; we recognize the order of nature and the relations of cause and effect as He recognizes them, and the whole tendency of this must be to bring our minds into grateful harmony with His.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts