Quotes About Nature

Comme sur un plant où les fleurs mûrissent à des époques différentes, je les avais vues, en de vieilles dames, sur cette plage de Balbec, ces dures graines, ces mous tubercules, que mes amies seraient un jour. Mais qu'importait ? en ce moment c'était la saison des fleurs.

For it is a charming law of nature, which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.

As on a plant whose flowers open at different seasons, I had seen, expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering-time

You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover. And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.

To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motor-cars, of different 'speeds.' There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.

Comme le public ne connaît du charme, de la grâce, des formes de la nature que ce qu'il en a puisé dans les poncifs d'un art lentement assimilé, et qu'un artiste original commence par rejeter ces poncifs, M. et Mme Cottard, image en cela du public, ne trouvaient ni dans la sonate de Vinteuil, ni dans les portraits du peintre, ce qui faisait pour eux l'harmonie de la musique et la beauté de la peinture.

the only touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the way someone could be useful in connection with the one thing that seemed important—my love. Then, perhaps out of duplicity, or in a genuine surge of affection inspired by gratitude, by self-interest, and by all the physical features of Mme de Guermantes that nature had replicated in her nephew, I went on to add:

At the very beginning of love, as at its end, we are not exclusively attached to a single beloved: it is the yearning to love, of which that person will be the loved outcome, and later the echo left in the memory, that wanders voluptuously in a place full of charms—sometimes deriving only from contingencies of nature, bodily pleasures, or habitation—interchangeable and interrelated enough for it to feel in harmony with any of them.

Nature, like the catastrophe at Pompeii or the metamorphosis of a nymph, freezes us into an accustomed cast of countenance. In the same way, the intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things.

Ces fleurs sont d'un rose vraiment céleste, dit Legrandin, je veux dire couleur de ciel rose. Car il y a un rose ciel comme il y a un bleu ciel.

Ve gözya?lar?m? silerken de, büyüdü?üm vakit di?er insanlar?n anlams?z hayatlar?n? taklit etmeyece?ime ve bahar geldi?i zaman, e?er Paris'te olursam, davetlere gidip türlü saçmal?klar dinleyece?ime, k?rlara gidip açan ilk akdikenleri görece?ime söz veriyordum...

After leaving this park the Vivonne began to flow again more swiftly. How often have I watched, and longed to imitate, when I should be free to live as I chose, a rower who had shipped his oars and lay stretched out on his back, his head down, in the bottom of his boat, letting it drift with the current, seeing nothing but the sky which slipped quietly above him, shewing upon his features a foretaste of happiness and peace.

In reality we always discover afterwards that our adversaries had a reason for being on the side they espoused, which has nothing to do with any element of right that there may be on that side, and that those who think as we do do so because their intelligence, if their moral nature is too base to be invoked, or their straightforwardness, if their penetration is feeble, has compelled them.

They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which a traveller is reading it to pass the time.

After a certain age, and even if our inner development varies, the more we become ourselves, the more family characteristics are accentuated. For, while maintaining the harmonious design of its tapestry, Nature breaks up the monotony of the composition by the variety in the faces that it inserts.

Now are the woods all black, But still the sky is blue.

There is no science for the teguments of a leaf, for the filaments of a cell structure, the winding of a vein, the passion of a habit, or for the twists and quirks of character.

En otro tiempo creí que la abeja era un beso con alas. Acabo de mojar mi dedo en un panal, y todo el perfume de la miel nueva se evaporó. Ha cesado de agradarme la miel.

Y las dos sombras blancas se turbaron, sin atreverse a decir nada. Porque su beso no tenía ya aguijón, ni olor salvaje, y como el deseo de las ovejas, de las cabras, de los pájaros y de las cigarras disminuía en su corazón, el placer de tocar sus cuerpos no los agitó ya con su estremecimiento.

It's a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god's handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There's not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

We don't get much of a spring or fall to speak of. Up here, for ten months a year, the weather has teeth in it.

Of course, there are things that are indifferent to human opinion – gravity, the moondriven motion of the tides, the boiling point of water. But the finer details of reality – the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person's true nature – have something delicate and consensual about them.