Quotes About Nature

Man is an element of all-living nature that rises in rebellion against nature. He will pay for this defiance with his life. Through this act of defiance, man distinguishes himself from all other living things, which as pure nature are blended into the tapestry of the natural universe. Mankind is the hero of this tragedy, world history the final act of the tragedy itself.

In other words: what we call history is the specific form in which the cycles of nature are acted out in man-made form. A quote from Goethe comes to mind as particularly illustrative: 'Colour is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.'[2] By analogy we might say with Spengler that culture is a law of nature in relation with human minds (the plural is an important qualification here).

We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.

Nature is to be handeled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is an impure solution.

World history is [the] conflict of nature in man and apart from man, akin to the other great spectacles of nature... the earthquake, the thunderstorm, the storm. The beauty of destruction, the greatness of the will to win.

The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end.

Men of a future Culture, with other souls and other passions, will hardly be able to resist the conviction that 'in those days' Nature herself was tottering.

According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyways. Because bees don't care what humans think is impossible." You've bee gnomed

It seems that life, in order to maintain itself, must revolt every so often against man's ceaseless attempts to master its irrational forces with his mind.

A man's real nature is never altered by education.

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

Whatever good I have kept in me—and in the world it is very hard to keep any—I owe it to Ben on those still Sunday mornings in those deep, old, quiet, green woods.

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

Days, when you could not stroll on the beach, without finding at your feet a corpse, hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across the harbour without seeing some dead body floating, upright and horrible, in the face of the summer sun.

Hence, being thus suited to the Age which had begotten her, being thus its creature and its likeness, she bad thriven in it as the snake thrives in hot and poisonous waters which for all purer and healthier things breed death.

which might have touched into sympathy, even the coldest nature. But (I do not think one can blame my Lady Molyneux; if she was born without feelings, perhaps she was hardly more responsible for the non-possession of them, than the idiot for the total absence of brain) her mother was not even silenced.

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

Out campaigning, one is free from all that trash. Before the cannon's mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one's own life on a thread, one cannot stop to ruin another's character. I do not know how it is — I have read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endurance to me as well as Nature.

I only know that a man who has the strength of the lion very often has also the tender touch of the dove.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.

Habits change into character.

Ah me! love can not be cured by herbs.