Nature Quotes

"Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature"

Blaise Pascal, Philosopher

"The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet

"Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature"

Eric Hoffer, Writer

"Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort"

Mason Cooley, Writer

"They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life"

Jane Austen, Writer

"Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men"

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet

"Every single thing you see on-screen came out of somebody's creativity. It doesn't exist. Nature didn't deliver it to us. Everything had to be dreamed"

Jeffrey Katzenberg, Producer

"The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology"

E. F. Schumacher, Economist

"Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal"

Arthur C. Clarke, Writer

"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays"

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosopher

"Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive"

James Lovelock, Scientist

"If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy"

Kurt Vonnegut, Author

"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature"

Camille Paglia, Author

"For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces"

Bridget Riley, Artist

"Water is the driving force of all nature"

Leonardo da Vinci, Artist

"Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road"

Richard Le Gallienne, Poet

"I like going into nature and that's where I'm happiest"

Garry Shandling, Comedian

"That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not"

Miguel de Cervantes, Novelist

"The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it"

Toni Morrison, Novelist

"A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn't use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph"

Bjorn Lomborg, Scientist

"The sum of the whole is plainly this: The nature of man considered in his single capacity, and with respect only to the present world, is adapted and leads him to attain the greatest happiness he can for himself in the present world"

Joseph Butler, Clergyman

"Nature hath given not only to the highest, but also to the inferior, classes of the people of this nation, a boldness and confidence in speaking and answering, even in the presence of their princes and chieftains"

Giraldus Cambrensis, Clergyman

"Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature"

Phyllis Schlafly, Activist

"The thing is helicopters are different from airplanes An airplane by it's nature wants to fly, and if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or incompetent piloting, it will fly"

Harry Reasoner, Journalist

"Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture"

Steven Pinker, Scientist

"Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?"

Herman Melville, Novelist

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

Guillaume Apollinaire, Novelist

"How much research I have to do depends on the nature of the story. For fantasy, none at all"

Alan Dean Foster, Author

"He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles"

Harry Emerson Fosdick, Clergyman

"It should seem, then, that the nature of society dictates another, a higher branch, whose superiority arises from its being the interested and natural conservator of the universal interest"

Ezra Stiles, Clergyman

"We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man"

Ernest Shackleton, Explorer

"If religion had a good purpose, then man would have created something great. But we're man: we mess up everything. We mess up nature. We mess up God. We take what is given to us and make it into what we think it should be"

Ziggy Marley, Musician

"When man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble"

Laura Dern, Actress

"Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches"

Jane Jacobs, Sociologist

"Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice"

Algernon Sidney, Politician

"I will be guided by the Christian ethic and an awareness that human action is by nature transient"

Horst Koehler, Statesman

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul"

John Muir, Environmentalist

"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, Scientist

"In our own time it has been seen... that simple children, roughly brought up in the wilderness, have begun to draw by themselves, impelled by their own natural genius, instructed solely by the example of these beautiful paintings and sculptures of Nature"

Giorgio Vasari, Artist

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