Quotes About Nature

What does it feel like to be a frog perceiving the world

Tengo ganas de andar, simplemente andar. No puedo hacer ya otra cosa.

En el cielo había nubes nocturnas, claras y teñidas por la luz amarillenta de la ciudad, con perspectivas negras hacia las estrellas. El viento era tan débil que en los árboles no se movían más que las hojas, y solamente las que estaban al final de las ramas.

As a girl she had washed her handkerchiefs in the river; or perhaps she had washed the river in her handkerchiefs, because finally the water ran fragrant, sweetened by the beauty on its banks, which was how it

This line of argument puts the lie to the common charge that Athanasius and other "classical trinitarians" depict God as a static, immobile being. Quite the contrary, classical orthodoxy insists that God is by nature generative, productive, fruitful, and fecund. The Father is eternally Father, having begotten the eternal Son in an eternal begetting. Arians, by contrast, must conclude that the Father has something less than a "generative nature.

It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.

I'd just had a review lesson in what I'd already learned over and over in a year and a half of exploring these Gulf of Mexico waters. These waters, the skies over the Gulf, the winds--they all did whatever, whenever they wanted. And we humans basically have two choices when it comes to the sea. We can either stay away from it all. Or we can be ready for anything.

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, I am. We are ontological oxymorons.

Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul.

Only because a bird doesn't swim in the ocean but flies in the air can it enter the ocean from above; only because God is not temporal can he enter into time.

So nothing can be ours by right, by nature, or by necessity. But one thing is mine by my free choice: the self I give away in love. This is the thing even God cannot do for me. It really is my choice. God can love, but He cannot compel my free love. If it is compelled, it is not free. If it is free, it is not compelled.

God's solution to the problem of evil is his Son Jesus Christ. The Father's love sent his Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil in human nature: that's the heart of the Christian story.

When you ask them what's wrong with the world, they never say there is not enough religion. They say there is not enough peace, prosperity, security, comfort, health care, or environmental responsibility. In other words, not enough human control over nature and human nature.

the species or nature with which we make our choices is fallen, sinful, selfish, and stupid; and we cannot by our own power attain the deepest and final end of our desires, union with God, eternal happiness. Thus

A fundamental principle of Catholic theology is that grace perfects nature rather than setting it aside; and that means that the Christian life is not a two-layer cake, the supernatural simply added on to the natural. It transforms the natural but by perfecting it, not by demeaning it.

Grace is not in nature so much as nature is in grace. Saint Thérèse said, on her deathbed, "Everything is grace.

For everything naturally desires good

not human nature with perfect preternatural gifts such as it was in unfallen Adam.

That's why contraception is wrong by nature: it's a limit, a "Wait! Hold! No! Not quite! We won't give each other Everything")

essential form

From Socrates through Aquinas, reason meant primarily the understanding of the nature of reality, the knowledge of the essences of things.

the nature of a voluntary act, whose principle needs to be in itself;

are more like Dog and Cat and Bird than like Lassie and Fido and Spot. Therefore

There—fore what is contrary to human nature is contrary to God's will.