Quotes About Nature

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

Maddi yaÅŸamdaki üretim biçimi, yaÅŸam?n toplumsal, siyasal ve düÅŸünsel sürecinin genel niteliÄŸine egemendir. Ä°nsanlar?n varl?klar?n? belirleyen ÅŸey, bilinçleri deÄŸildir; tam tersine, onlar?n bilinçlerini, toplumsal varl?klar? belirler.

Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws . It does not comprehend these laws — i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property.

A slug is always on its own. It is a lonely insect.

I don't like jellyfish, they're not a fish, they're just a blob. They don't have eyes, fins or scales like a cod. They float about blind, stinging people in the seas, And no one eats jellyfish with chips and mushy peas. Get rid of 'em!

had a wee in the Amazon. Until Richard told me I should be careful because there are some tiny fish that can swim up from the water through my urine and into my knob! Is that how amazing the Amazon is? The fish in there would really rather live in my knob than the river.

I've always wanted to kick a duck up the arse.

I stopped listening to Justin. I don't think he likes to leave anything as nature intended. He'd iron out the lump on a camel's back and get a pelican to have its throat lifted.

We always interfere with nature. I think if tennis players continue to wear headbands they will end up killing off eyebrows, as they're there to catch sweat.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

He was his mother's son, kind and gentle. She was her father's daughter, quick of mind, fascinated by intrigue and all that went with it. But

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life.

He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother's arms. The mysterious Sylvie. Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away. His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water. Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life. Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.

She was born with the winter already in her bones.

He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer.

Human nature favors the tribal. Tribalism engenders violence. It was ever thus and so it will ever be.

Small boys were a mystery to Sylvie. The satisfaction they gained from throwing sticks or stones for hours on end, the obsessive collection of inanimate objects, the brutal destruction of the fragile world around them, all seemed at odds with the men they were supposed to become.

When she was little they had lived in an old farmhouse too, in the middle of nothing of but landscape.

could smell the peppery-sweet perfume of pinks

Pamela produced placid babies. They don't tend to turn feral until they're two, she said.

If Bertie was a god (a favourite fantasy), she would be manufacturing things there was a shortage of - bees, tigers, dormice - not flip-flops and phone covers and toothpaste.

Maurice had disappeared after breakfast. He was a nine-year-old boy and free to go where he pleased with whomsoever he pleased, although he tended to keep to the exclusive company of other nine-year-old boys. Sylvie had no idea what they did but at the end of the day he would return, filthy from head to toe and with some unappetizing trophy, a jar of frogs or worms, a dead bird, the bleached skull of some small creature.

Viola was a good reader, a bookworm—a phrase she hated. "How can a worm be a nice thing to be?" Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. "Without worms we wouldn't be able to grow food and everyone would starve," Nancy said reasonably.

Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.