Quotes About Nature

We recognize in a plant some unknown power, a single, form-giving force, which creates and conserves, which moves unwaveringly toward its end, which appropriates what is useful to it and rejects that which would harm it.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

Magic is something that happens that appears to be impossible. What I call 'illusion magic' uses laws of science and nature that are already known. Real magic uses laws that haven't yet been discovered.

My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.

And the beautiful open spaces, the forests of Pennsylvania, the recreational uses that come from having these green open spaces and forests, they contribute dramatically to the level of our tourism, dramatically.

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

Nature creates natural swarms. UNU uses networking technology and algorithms to take advantage of the knowledge, wisdom, and insights of a large group of people by allowing them to think as one.

There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.

The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It's a sort of rough and ready space, I don't film there.

The Amazon uses as much oxygen as it produces.

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

Using simple equipment and daylight alone is for me a pleasure and a replenishment.

My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

You kind of alluded to it in your introduction. I mean, for the last 300 or so years, the exact sciences have been dominated by what is really a good idea, which is the idea that one can describe the natural world using mathematical equations.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

Free soloing is just the most natural way man can climb. It's just using your hands and feet without any use of protection or rope to ascend.

I've been using the power of the IMAX medium, with its gigantic screens and supervivid pictures, to get people to fall in love with the ocean.

I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.