Quotes About Nature

The winds have a force so terrific as to eclipse anything previously known in the world. We have found the kingdom of blizzards. We have come to an accursed land.

The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.

Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.

The Athenian cannot refute the atheists before he has stated their assertions. It appears that they assert that body is prior to soul or mind, or that soul or mind is derivative from body and, consequently, that nothing is by nature just or unjust, or that all right originates in convention. The refutation of them consists in the proof that soul is prior to body, which proof implies that there is natural right.

So I believe then that the primary motive, the most intelligible motive of the doctrine of eternal return in Nietzsche is to make intelligible nature as humanly willed and not given. And the whole difficulty in Nietzsche's philosophy, I believe, is concentrated in this point.

That which is by nature private or a man's own is the body and only the body.[37] The needs or desires of the body induce men to extend the sphere of the private, of what is each man's own, as far as they can. This most powerful striving is countered by music education which brings about moderation, i.e., a most severe training of the soul of which, it seems, only a minority of men is capable. [37] Republic , 464d; cf. Laws 739c.

The soul cannot be immortal if it is composed of many things unless the composition is most perfect. But the soul as we know it from our experience lacks that perfect harmony. In order to find the truth, one would have to recover by reasoning the original or true nature of the soul. This reasoning is not achieved in the Republic . That is to say, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul without having brought to light the nature of the soul.

Art presupposes nature, whereas nature doesn't presuppose art. Man's creative abilities, which are more admirable than any of his products, are not themselves produced my man: the genius of Shakespeare was not the work of Shakespeare. Nature supplies not only the materials but also the models for all arts;

I]f the poets are perhaps the men who understand best the nature of the passions which the law restrains, they are very far from being merely the servants of the legislators; they are also the men from whom the prudent legislator will learn. The genuine "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" concerns, from the philosopher's point of view, not the worth of poetry as such, but the order of rank of philosophy and poetry.

Its status is rather like that of a painting of a perfectly beautiful human being, i.e., it is only by virtue of the painter's painting; more precisely, the just city is only "in speech": it "is" only by virtue of having been figured out with a view to justice itself or to what is by nature right on the one hand and the human all-too-human on the other.

If we were entitled to take a poetic utterance literally, we could say that the first man we know who spoke of nature was the Wily Odysseus who had seen the towns of many men and had thus come to know how much the thoughts of men differ from town to town or from tribe to tribe.

This is Nietzsche's fundamental problem: to find a way back to nature, but on the basis of the modern difficulty of conceiving of nature as the standard.

Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds.

Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.

The sky darkened, the liquid singing of the blackbirds diminished and ceased, mud hens swam back to shore, climbed up the banks and huddled in the willows. The lights of a farm came on in the brown distance where patches of tule fog lay on the barren muddy fields. A wind came with the darkness, rattling the license plate, and a low, honking flight of geese passed.

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.

Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites

wherever they looked, the chaos of life seemed to produce quantifiable and predictable patterns.

The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we've achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is nature.

For those new to philosophy, its two fundamental branches are metaphysics, which studies the nature of existence, and epistemology, which studies man's means of knowledge.

Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence, of knowledge, and of values.

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.

The branch of philosophy that studies values is ethics (or morality), which rests on both the above branches—on a view of the world in which man acts, and of man's nature, including his means of knowledge.