Quotes About Nature

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man

For he who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to be lord and master; and he who can work only with his body is by nature a slave. The slave is to the master what the body is to the mind.

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to beautify things.

Some primitive peoples, like the Veddahs of Ceylon, had no dwellings at all, and were content with the earth and the sky; some, like the Tasmanians, slept in hollow trees; some, like the natives of New South Wales, lived in caves; others, like the Bushmen, built here and there a wind-shelter of branches, or, more rarely, drove piles into the soil and covered their tops with moss and twigs.

Yet he was not all unhappy: the peace and quiet which he had never had when sane were his now; Nature had had mercy on him when she made him mad. He caught his sister once weeping as she looked at him, and he could not understand her tears: "Lisbeth," he asked, "why do you cry? Are we not happy?" On one occasion he heard talk of books; his pale face lit up; "Ah!" he said, brightening, "I too have written

physical philosophers; they had sought for the physis or nature of external things, the laws and constituents of the material and measurable world. That is very good, said Socrates; but there is an infinitely worthier subject for philosophers than all these trees and stones, and even all those stars; there is the mind of man. What is man, and what can he become?

Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this insatiable desire for possession and for power.. Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.

says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.")

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

Being also a poet, he put Francis Bacon into doggerel: You glorify Nature and meditate on her; Why not domesticate her and regulate her? You obey Nature and sing her praise; Why not control her course and use it?

If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.

We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind.

fue el miedo lo que en primer lugar creó a los dioses»:1 el miedo a fuerzas ocultas en la tierra, los ríos, los océanos, los árboles, los vientos y el cielo. La religión se convirtió en el culto propiciatorio de esas fuerzas a través de ofrendas, sacrificios, conjuros y oraciones.

Our states, being ourselves multiplied, are what we are; they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale.

because we are human we suppose that all events lead up to man and are designed to subserve his needs. But this is an anthropocentric delusion, like so much of our thinking.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee The flower grows; The rose's thorns are all for me; For thee the rose.

Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically[.]

Life, says a fine Greek adage, is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.)

The simplest meaning of life, then, is joy -- the exhilaration of experience itself, of physical well-being; sheer satisfaction of muscle and sense, of palate and ear and eye. If the child is happier than the man it is because it has more body and less soul, and understands that nature comes before philosophy; it asks for no further meaning to its arms and legs than their abounding use. Perhaps if we used our arms and legs we would be happy too;

Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and "he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have.