Quotes About Nature

The divine in human nature disappears and interest, greed and selfishness takes it place. When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors the words of doom are already written upon its walls.

It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont .

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.

Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks — already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - to turn the choad of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.

If I'm no real good, I prefer to be just frankly no good. I don't want to disguise myself as a man of learning. I don't want to be the representative of a hobby. I want to be what nature made me—no good.

What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks." And

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes

At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.

Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

Rams wrapped in thermogene beget no lambs.

Fortunately, however, birds don't understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine, he went on, preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn't he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him?