Quotes About Nature

Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

Hay quien se cría en una colina y quien se cría en el valle. La mayoria lo hace en el llano. Yo vine a la vida inclinada, y así es como he vivido desde entonces.

Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.

I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.

So long as one remains in the same condition, the inclinations which result from habit and are the least natural to us can be kept; but as soon as the situation changes, habit ceases and the natural returns. Education is certainly only habit. Now are there not people who forget and lose their education? Others who keep it? Where does this difference come from? If the name nature were limited to habits conformable to nature, we would spare ourselves this garble!

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to observe once, what he has every day seen. Jean Jacques Rousseau, On the Inequality among Mankind, Ch. 1, 20.

It is pity in which the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.

If I had remained free, obscure, and alone placed in the situation Nature designed me for, I should have done nothing but what was right, for my heart bears not the feeds of any mischievous passion. Had I been invisible and powerful as the Almighty, I should have been benevolent and good like him: it is power and freedom that make good men, weakness and slavery never made any but wicked ones.

Aristotle . . . said that men were not at all euqal by nature, since some were born for slavery and others born to be masters. Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause . . . if there are slaves by nature, it is only because there has been slavery against nature. Force made the first slaves; and their cowardice perpetuates their slavery.

Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade men assembled together, is the cry of nature.

La vida ambulante es la que mejor me conviene. Ir de camino con buen tiempo, por un país hermoso, sin llevar prisa, y tener un objeto agradable por término del viaje, he ahí, de todos los modos de vivir, el que más me agrada.

War, then, is not a relation between men, but between states; in war individuals are enemies wholly by chance, not as men, not even as citizens, but only as soldiers; not as member of their country, but only as its defenders. In a word, a state can have as an enemy only another state, not men, becuase there can be no real relations between things possessing different intrinsic natures.

J'aperçois Dieu partout dans ses oeuvres ; je le sens en moi, je le vois tout autour de moi ; mais sitôt que je veux le contempler en lui-même, sitôt que je veux chercher où il est, ce qu'il est, quelle est sa substance, il m'échappe et mon esprit troublé n'aperçoit plus rien.

Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses, tout dégénère entre les mains de l'homme.

Les villes sont le gouffre de l'espèce humaine.

I can understand how it is that city-dwellers, who see only walls and streets and crimes, have so little religion. But I cannot understand how those who live in the country, and the solitary especially, can be lacking in faith. How is it that their souls are not raised in ecstasy a hundred times a day to the Author of the wonders that strike their eyes?

Nada manifiesta tanto las verdaderas inclinaciones de un hombre como las clases de relaciones que contrae '.

In the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad.