Quotes about nature

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

— Warren Buffett

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

— Noam Chomsky

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

— Denis Diderot

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

— Albert Einstein

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't --it's human.

— Desiderius Erasmus

It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.

— Anatole France

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

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!

— Emma Goldman

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

— Hermann Hesse

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

— Kalan

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify -- so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

— John Keats

We are all murderers and prostitutes --no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

— R. D. Laing

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.

— Henry Miller

I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

— Thomas Paine

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

— William Shakespeare

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

— George Bernard Shaw

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

— Mark Twain

It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside.

— Source Unknown

Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the truth, bending over backward, lying down on the job, sidestepping responsibility and pushing their luck.

— Source Unknown

It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it.

— Source Unknown

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

— Giambattista Vico

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

— Oscar Wilde

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

— Virginia Woolf

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

— Joseph Addison

I am at two with nature.

— Woody Allen

Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.

— Lorraine Anderson

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.

— Maya Angelou

The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.

— Guillaume Apollinaire

All men by nature desire to know.

— Aristotle

Nature does nothing uselessly.

— Aristotle

To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

— Jane Austen

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

— Francis Bacon

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

— Francis Bacon

Art is man's nature: Nature is God's art.

— Philip James Bailey

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

— Hosea Ballou

As a profession advertising is young; as a force it is as old as the world. The first four words ever uttered, Let there be light, constitute its charter. All nature is vibrant with its impulse.

— Bruce Barton

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

— Charles Baudelaire

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.

— Bernoulli

I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.

— Bhagavad Gita

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

— William Blake

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.

— Jacob Bronowski

Nature is the art of God.

— Dante Alighieri

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.

— Sir Thomas Browne

Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.

— Pearl S. Buck

Nature's law affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.

— Luther Burbank

As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.

— Lord Byron

What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird?

— Pedro Calderon de la Barca

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.

— Albert Camus

And thus they give the time, that Nature meant for peaceful sleep and meditative snores, to ceaseless din and mindless merriment and waste of shoes and floors.

— Lewis Carroll

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.

— Rachel Carson

Whenever man comes up with a better mousetrap, nature immediately comes up with a better mouse.

— James Carswell

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

— George Washington Carver

That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.

— Lydia M. Child

Nature is a good name for an effect whose cause is God.

— William Cowper

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

— Charles R. Darwin

Nature, like us is sometimes caught without her diadem.

— Emily Dickinson

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Who can explain the secret pathos of Nature's loveliness? It is a touch of melancholy inherited from our mother Eve. It is an unconscious memory of the lost Paradise. It is the sense that even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

— Henry Van Dyke

I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.

— Bob Dylan

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

— Albert Einstein

The environment is everything that isn't me.

— Albert Einstein

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is related to all nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of hidden stuff.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature... She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Richard P. Feynman

All nature wears one universal grin.

— Henry Fielding

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

— Anatole France

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

— Margaret Fuller

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

— Henry Fuseli

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

— Kahlil Gibran

The unnatural, that too is natural.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Nature goes her own way and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes. By the deep sea, and music in its roars; I love not man the less, but nature more.

— George Gordon

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

— Alan Havhamess

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.

— Francis Herbert Hedge

The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.

— Heisenberg

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

— Eric Hoffer

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back.

— Horace

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

— Victor Hugo

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

— P. D. James

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another.

— (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

— Johannes Kepler

Nature uses as little as possible of anything.

— Johannes Kepler

Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

— Paul Klee

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

— Joseph Wood Krutch

Nature is not human hearted.

— Lao-Tzu

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor our precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature.

— William Law

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg