Best Nature Quotes

We simply need that wild country available to us ... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. ~ Wallace Stegner

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts. ~ William Hazlitt

Arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in which the best natures should be trained, and which must not be given up. ~ Plato

Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best. ~ Bernard Meltzer

I think the most effective forms of critique are ones that establish a common ground for people to occupy, and then appeal to the best nature of people on that common ground. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Katharine Hepburn said it best. 'Nature', she says majestically to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, 'is what we are put in this world to rise above.' The ~ Jonathan Sacks

Okay, 'Best Party Ever'
to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be? ~ Lena Dunham

Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature. ~ John Dryden

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest. ~ Emile Souvestre

Human nature is not of itself vicious. ~ Thomas Paine

Question for your life: If you could change War's name, do you think you'd change its nature? ~ Jarod Kintz

Women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women. ~ Bella Abzug

We must learn that when people devalue any one Life, they devalue all Life. ~ Donald L. Hicks

You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep. ~ Herculine Barbin

A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind. ~ A.L. Kennedy

Ah, what shall I be at fifty,
should nature keep me alive,
if I find the world so bitter
when I am but twenty-five? ~ Alfred The Great

Humility is knowing that you can get an answer from anybody: be it a child, another person, or nature. ~ Tariq Ramadan

The only calendar I need is just outside my window. With eyes to see and ears to hear, nature keeps me posted. ~ Alfred Armand Montapert

Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose. ~ Oscar Wilde

Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty. ~ Stephen Hawking

Life is a dance of nature. ~ Toba Beta

Dramatic and sudden changes in the body's frequency result in great pain and damage. In such cases, treatment must involve equal or stronger frequencies to be effective -- often having to do with the scalpel. Sharp instruments, by nature, have a higher frequency... ~ Masaru Emoto

Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion, who have any knowledge of human nature, do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it not more rational to expect, that she will try to please other men; and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavour to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover - and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate. How much do you need to eat, to compensate for a feeling of not belonging? How much pornography to compensate for a deficit of intimacy? How much money to compensate for a deep sense of insecurity? No amount is enough ~ Charles Einstein

The attitude of gratitude is the highest way of living, and is the biggest truth, the highest truth. You cannot live with applied consciousness until you understand that you have to be grateful for what you have. If you are grateful for what you have, then Mother Nature will give you more. ~ Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Take us generally as a people, we are neither lazy nor idle; and considering how little we have to excite or stimulate us, I am almost astonished that there are so many industrious and ambitious ones to be found - although I acknowledge, with extreme sorrow, that there are some who never were and never will be serviceable to society. And have you not a similar class among yourselves? ~ Maria W. Stewart

I'm a nature bug. ~ Donna Karan

Setting aside the truth value of the UFO phenomenon, it is an interesting sociological reality that so many people are unwilling to discuss the most - and at times traumatic - experience of their lives. What does it say about our society that this is so? My feeling is that, by its very nature, it represents a form of repression. If you are a reader who believes UFOs to be nonsense of some sort, I can nevertheless assure you that you have a friend or relation who has seen one. They have simply learned not to discuss it. Many people can live perfectly well within the constraints of repression and denial; they simply learn to shut off certain parts of their mind. It is sad, but it happens all of the time.

But not everyone is the same. Not everyone is willing to do this, or even can do this. By any estimate, there are may millions of people on this planet who have had a powerful UFO experience. They cannot and will not be silenced indefinitely. ~ Richard M. Dolan

The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies. ~ Paul Valery

If you nurture Life, Life will nurture you. ~ Donald L. Hicks

This world is your world but that doesn't mean you can always stop it from burning. ~ Oli Anderson

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much. ~ Michael Pollan

There is an uncommonly harsh beauty to the Tibetan landscape. Its nakedness makes it seem incapable of deception, but under its calm deportment it conceals winds so brutal that yaks are known to die while their jaws are in masticating bliss. On hot summer days the sun licks up the rain within minutes. No puddles are formed; no moisture lingers in the air. It is only the droplets on tiny leaves of the baby turnip plant that betray rain. ~ Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. ~ Camille Paglia

One paints from nature not in order to copy, but to express feelings of grandeur. ~ Georges Vantongerloo

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That singular uncompromising nature I think is always quite attractive, not just for an actor to play, we're attracted to uncompromising people whether they're nice or not, because they're 3D, they're solid, you can define them, it's not wishy washy. ~ James McAvoy

The dried blood from the wounds leaves dark and repulsive stains on the ground. Cleaning them up, I think of the identical nature of men: the same red blood irrigating the same organs. These organs, situated in the same places, carry out the same functions. The same remedies cure the same illnesses everywhere under the sun, whether the individual be white or black. Everything united men. Why, then, do they kill each other in ignoble wars for causes that are futile when compared with the massacre of human lives? So many devastating wars! And yet man takes himself to be a superior being. In what way is his intelligence useful to him? His intelligence begets both good and ill, more often ill than good. ~ Mariama Ba

...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. ~ Peter Watson

Neither by nature, therefore, nor contrary to nature are the virtues present; they are instead present in us who are of such a nature as to receive them, and who are completed1 through habit. ~ Aristotle.

I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth. ~ Patricia Churchland

Seed Leaves

Homage to R. F.

Here something stubborn comes,

Dislodging the earth crumbs

And making crusty rubble.

it comes up bending double,

And looks like a green staple.

It could be seedling maple,

Or artichoke, or bean.

That remains to be seen.



Forced to make choice of ends,

The stalk in time unbends,

Shakes off the seed-case, heaves

Aloft, and spreads two leaves

Which still display no sure

And special signature.

Toothless and fat, they keep

The oval form of sleep.



This plant would like to grow

And yet be embryo;

In crease, and yet escape

The doom of taking shape;

Be vaguely vast, and climb

To the tip end of time

With all of space to fill,

Like boundless Igdrasil

That has the stars for fruit.



But something at the root

More urgent that the urge

Bids two true leaves emerge;

And now the plant, resigned

To being self-defined

Before it can commerce

With the great universe,

Takes aim at all the sky

And starts to ramify. ~ Richard Wilbur

You've seen their logo - it's an apple with a bite taken out of it. That bite is the symbol of the moment mankind broke their pact with God, transgressed their own innocent nature, and chewed into consuming and consumerism. We have externalized all wonder, materialized our inherent magic. ~ Russell Brand

I have never yet managed to see the moment of the petals of a bud unfurling. I might dedicate the rest of my life to it and might still never see it. No, not might, I will: I will dedicate the rest of my life, in which I walk forward into this blossoming. When there's no blossom I will dead-head and wait. It'll be back. That's the nature of things.
As it is, I am careful when kissing, or when taking anyone in my arms. I warn them about the thorns. I treat myself with care. I guard against pests and frost-damage. I am careful with my roots. I know they need depth and darkness, and any shit that comes my way I know exactly what to do with. I'm composed when it comes to compost. ~ Ali Smith

And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It's more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman's soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person's life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart - and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I've gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it's not true, but I really don't care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful. ~ Katherine Center

Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough. ~ E. O. Wilson

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism. ~ John Brunner

Architects are by nature and pursuit, leaders and teachers. ~ Samuel