Quotes About Nature

Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Everyone knew that the weather was such a system—aperiodic. Nature is full of others: animal populations that rise and fall almost regularly, epidemics that come and go on tantalizingly near-regular schedules. If the weather ever did reach a state exactly like one it had reached before, every gust and cloud the same, then presumably it would repeat itself forever after and the problem of forecasting would become trivial.

Samuel Butler had said a century earlier—and did not claim to be the first—that a hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Butler was quite serious, in his way:

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

As an element in the world revealed by computer exploration, the strange attractor began as a mere possibility, marking a place where many great imaginations in the twentieth century had failed to go. Soon, when scientists saw what computers had to show, it seemed like a face they had been seeing everywhere, in the music of turbulent flows or in clouds scattered like veils across the sky. Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.

There is not a single brand of realism. Your paintings can be true to nature but emphasize different aspects of visual truth compared to another artist. The way you paint is a record of how you see. It will still be accepted as realism. This explains why Vermeer or Gérôme are instantly recognizable. Each is attentive to different facts of nature. Those who describe realism as slavish imitation miss this point.

And I could find other excuses to get out and sit on the crisp grass and look out over the airy roof of Yorkshire. It was like taking time out of life. Time to get things into perspective and assess my progress.

James Herriot

That ewe's life had been saved not by medicinal therapy but simply by stopping her pain and allowing nature to do its own job of healing. It was a lesson I have never forgotten; the animals confronted with severe continuous pain and the terror and shock that goes with it will often retreat even into death, and if you can remove that pain amazing things can happen. It is difficult to explain rationally but I know that it is so.

clear-skinned

James Herriot

All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all. Cecil Frances Alexander 1818-1895

Northern Pennines.

All tall trees are wise, according to the West African teacher Malidoma Somé, because their movement is imperceptible, the connection between above and below so firm, their physical presence so generously useful.

Ideea creÈ™terii a ajuns azi un cliÈ™eu biografic. A fi adult înseamn? a fi un omn care a crescut. Dar este numai o modalitate de a privi maturizarea, fie ea È™i eroic?. Orice copac È™i orice legum? care cresc îÈ™i trimit din ce în ce mai jos r?d?cinile. Ne înc?p??ân?m s? vedem doar partea de sus a creÈ™terii noastre organice.

Acceptând ideea c? suntem consecinÈ›a unui amestec subtil de forÈ›e ereditare È™i factori de mediu, reducem persoana uman? la un simplu rezultat.

Stejarul face ghinde, dar o ghind? poart? în ea tot stejarul.

Attention does for consciousness what our hands do for our bodies: it grabs hold of nature so that we can change it

You see, they had to convince us that the earth was dead because otherwise they could not begin their autopsy in earnest.

He was not much of a nature-worshipper, but he perceived that nature here was certainly at her best and liveliest. He gave her, as it were, full marks and a nod of approval, feeling that she would do very nicely as a background to his satisfying emotions

Let us hope, however, that they will not forget the spirit of tolerance which to-day is in such grave peril because it is in the very nature of tolerance to take tolerance for granted.