Quotes about nature

The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature --were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Lightning is the shorthand of a storm, and tells of chaos.

— Eric Mackay

It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.

— Karl Marx

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

— W. Somerset Maugham

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

— Alice Meynell

The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity.

— Molescholte

Let Nature have her way; she understands her business better than we do.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

— John Muir

If winds are the spirit of the sky's ocean, the clouds are the texture. Their is easily the most uninhibited dominion of the earth. Nothing in physical shape is too fantastic for them. They can be round as apples or as fine as string, as dense as a jungle, as wispy as a whiff of down, as mild as puddle water or as potent as the belch of a volcano. Some are thunderous anvils formed by violent up drafts from the warm earth. Some are ragged coattails of storms that have passed. Some are stagnant blankets of warm air resting on cold. I have seen clouds in the dawn that looked like a pink Sultan with his pale harem maidens and a yellow slob of eunuch lolling impotent in the background.

— Guy Murchie

Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress. When you realize there are no goals or objectives, then you realize, too, that there is no chance: for only in a world of objectives does the word chance have any meaning.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

— Dolly Parton

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing, the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom.

— Francis Picabia

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

— Luigi Pirandello

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

— Alexander Pope

No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.

— Llewelyn Powys

Nature surpasses nurture.

— Proverb

Nature breaks through the eyes of the cat.

— Irish Proverb

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience finds in nature the correspondence through which we may know our boundless selves.

— Kathleen Raine

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself --my disgust at her barbarity --clumsiness --darkness --bitter mockery of herself --is the most desolating.

— John Ruskin

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

— John Ruskin

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.

— Marquis De Sade

From our earliest hour we have been taught that the thought of the heart, the shaping of the rain-cloud, the amount of wool that grows on a sheep's back, the length of a drought, and the growing of the corn, depend on nothing that moves immutable, at the heart of all things; but on the changeable will of a changeable being, whom our prayers can alter. To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not; to go to church or not; to say his prayers right or not; to travel on a Sunday or not. Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is --the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?

— Olive Schreiner

If you live according to the dictates of nature, you will never be poor; if according to the notions of man, you will never be rich.

— Seneca

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

— Socrates

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

— Susan Sontag

Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.

— Gil Stern

The sun will set without thy assistance.

— The Talmud

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?

— James Thomson

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

— Henry David Thoreau

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

— Ivan Turgenev

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.

— Mark Twain

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

— Raoul Vaneigem

The law cannot equalize mankind in spite of nature.

— Marquis De Vauvenargues

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on -- have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear -- what remains? Nature remains.

— Walt Whitman

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

— Walt Whitman

She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.

— William Wordsworth

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

— William Wordsworth

For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

— William Wordsworth

Nature, by its very nature, is very brutal and unequal. However, Man has somehow managed to transform the nature of its brutality and inequality.

— Kedar Joshi

When you have poison oak you love nature a little less.

— Michael Lipsey

Man kind is the master piece of this world of perfection.

— Fausto Gil

Between you and this world there is only room for greatness.

— Fausto Gil

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

— Hermann Hesse

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hope to see a better human nature on earth.

— Mak Kazeronnie

The best remedy for those who are frightened, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere they can be alone, alone with the sky, nature and God. For then and only then can you feel that everything is as it should be and that God wants people to be happy amid nature's beauty and simplicity.

— Anne Frank

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.

— Garrison Keillor