Nature Description Quotes

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. ~ William Faulkner

High up on Monte Salvatore the window of some shepherd's hut opened a golden eye. The roses hung their heads and dreamed under the still September clouds, and the water plashed and murmured softly among the pebbles of the shore. ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich

What man is happy? He who has a healthy body, a resourceful mind, and a docile nature. ~ Thales

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds. ~ Francis Bacon

I believe in sensuality. I believe in sex. I believe in the survival of the species. I like aspects of things that are ethereal, but I like the reality of nature and embracing the way nature works, and aspects of interrelationships between male-female, aspects of the body, the way the body has changed over thousands of years ... ~ Jeff Koons

The truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance. ~ Orson Scott Card

My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves. ~ Gerhard Richter

We are not at all to wonder [ ... ] that we having but some few superficial ideas of things, discovered to us only by the senses from without, or by the mind, reflecting on what it experiments in itself within, have no knowledge beyond that, much less of the internal constitution, and true nature of things, being destitute of faculties to attain it. ~ John Locke

There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair. ~ Blaise Pascal

To understand why dictators have a problem with making peace - or at least a genuine peace - the link between the nature of a regime and its external behavior must be understood. ~ Natan Sharansky

People shouldn't argue about how old the Earth is, they should be concerned with how much longer it will last. ~ K.R. Royal

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations. Nature ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm not afraid of the devil. The devil can handle me - he's got judo I never heard of. But he can't handle the One to whom I'm joined; he can't handle the One to whom I'm united; he can't handle the One whose nature dwells in my nature. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth or power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge. ~ Pythagoras

This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for life is never so low or so little as when occupied with the present. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Human nature provides sufficient distrust of all that is alien, so that there is no need of any artificial supply. ~ Calvin Coolidge

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted. ~ David Brin

The essence of nature guiding is to travel gracefully rather than arrive ~ Enos Mills

A love of nature keeps no factories busy. ~ Aldous Huxley

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again. ~ Gustav Mahler

Our religious traditions must recognize certain things as beyond their competence. But at the same time, the properly secular society has to be sober in its recognition that it exists under God, firm in its understanding that fundamental truths, many of them religious in nature, undergird its very existence. ~ Francis George

He called his approach non-teleological thinking, or "is thinking." The term non-teleological was coined by Steinbeck's best friend, Edward F. Ricketts; and as the two men articulated their shared philosophy, they emphasized the need to see as clearly as a scientist: that is, to accept life on its own terms. "Is thinking" focused not on ends but on the process of life, the Aristotelean efficient cause of nature. ~ John Steinbeck

especially given to dirtying the butter (a thing quite superfluous, according to Captain Burt's description of Highland butter). ~ Andrew Lang

The world suddenly opened up, and she was coming to new realizations and a greater awareness, concerning the nature of reality, and the world, which her mortal mind had previously been unable to conceive. She smiled her radiant goddess smile and began to laugh. Her omnipresent peals of mirth resonated through the forest, seeming to echo to the edges of the universe and back. She was getting her first glimpses of the world, seen through the eyes of a goddess; the first sweet tastes of a consciousness empowered beyond all human levels of comprehension, and her spirit was in exultant bliss. ~ Alexei Maxim Russell

Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful. ~ George Sand

It is the nature of physics to hear the loudest of mouths over the most comprehensive ones. ~ Criss Jami

Nature is only another chimera. ~ Julien Torma

He who longs alway after God, he seeth Him: for God is in all things. Existing things are dependent on that which is, and nothing can be unless it is in that which is. God then is mingled with everything, maintaining their nature: and in His holy flesh the God-Word is made one in subsistence and is mixed with our nature, yet without confusion. ~ John Damascene

Christ can rid you of inner conflict. Man without God is always torn between two urges. His nature prompts him to do wrong, and his conscience urges him to do right. ~ Billy Graham

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield ~ W.B.Yeats

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family. ~ G.K. Chesterton

To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth rather than of treaty processes or even of inter-cultural understanding. Simply to recognize the basic nature and dimension of the issues we face is already an advance. ~ Thomas Berry

God bless the good-natured, for they bless everybody else. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia. ~ Randal Marlin

The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together. ~ Bryant McGill

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden. ~ David Mitchell

Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber; it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears of. There is so little real friendship in the world! – and unfortunately' (speaking low and tremulously) 'there are so many who forget to think seriously till it is almost too late. ~ Jane Austen

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. ~ George Edward Woodberry

To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. ~ Thomas Huxley

God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on.
It's all the same drive. The same dream.
It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.
I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull's-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull's-eye. It's not one man's opinion; it's a law of nature. ~ Phil Knight