Nature Related Quotes

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art. ~ Louisa May Alcott

The deeper question ... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform ... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge ... ~ Robert Bly

There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Yet all attackers benefit from the asymmetric nature of the technology: the defender must build a perfect wall to keep out all intruders, while the offense need find only one chink in the armor through which to attack. ~ Marc Goodman

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself. ~ Susanna Clarke

Why does the nature of the traumatic event exert so much influence over whether what happened will be remembered in words? It appears that sudden, fast events completely overcome any defenses that a small child can muster. Long-standing events, on the other hand, stimulate defensive operations - denial, splitting, self-anesthesia, and dissociation. These defenses interfere with memory formation, storage, and retrieval. When the defenses are completely overrun by one sudden, unanticipated terror, brilliant, overly clear verbal memories are the result. On the other hand, when the defenses are set up in advance in order to deal with the terrors the child knows to be coming, blurry, partial, or absent verbal memories are retained. The child may even develop blanket amnesia for certain years in the past. ~ Lenore Terr

THE LILIES

This morning it was, on the pavement,
When that smell hit me again
And set the houses reeling.
People passed like rain:
(The way rain moves and advances over the hills)
And it was hot, hot and dank,
The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too.
What was it?
Something I had forgotten.
I tried to remember, standing there,
Sniffing the air on the pavement.
Somehow I thought of flowers.
Flowers! That bad smell!
I looked: down lanes, past houses--
There, behind a hoarding,
A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten.

Then I remembered:
After the rain, on the farm,
The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone
Suddenly turned wet and green and warm.
The green was a clash of music.
Dry Africa became a swamp
And swamp-birds with long beaks
Went humming and flashing over the reeds
And cicadas shrilling like a train.

I took off my clothes and waded into the water.
Under my feet first grass, then mud,
Then all squelch and water to my waist.
A faint iridescence of decay,
The heat swimming over the creeks
Where the lilies grew that I wanted:
Great lilies, white, with pink streaks
That stood to their necks in the water.
Armfuls I gathered, working there all day.
With the green scum closing round my waist,
The little frogs about my legs,
And jelly-tr ~ Doris Lessing

We have learned that a majority of parents whose children have late-onset or acquired autism believe it is vaccine-related. They deserve answers. We have also learned that the parents have been our best investigators in looking for both causes of autism and for treatments. ~ Dan Burton

(On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature. ~ Anthony Trollope

Usually, we hate the noise but sometimes we feel empty without that noise! ~ Nikhil Karke

When I feel ill, cinema pictures of the circumstances of my death flit across my mind's eye. I cannot prevent them. I consider the nature of the disease and all I said before I died- something heroic, of course! ~ W.N.P. Barbellion

Let him look into [fear's] eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, - see the whelping of this lion, - which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on superior. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sheeplike nature of travel - being on a beach with thousands of other people is not my idea of fun. I also don't like being a tourist because you don't know what's really going on in a country. ~ Diana Quick

I think it's almost a law of nature that there are only certain things that hit an emotive space, and that's what was always special for me about music: it made me feel something. ~ Kate Bush

Everything in his life backfired. First that rocket at Waterloo. Then his engagement. Now this whole blasted arrangement with Emma. Despite the supposedly impersonal nature of their marriage, she was slowly working her way under his skin, under his scars. If not deeper. ~ Tessa Dare

Plainly it is not every error made by a witness which affects his credibility. In each case the trier of fact has to make an evaluation; taking into account such matters as the nature of the contradictions, their number and importance, and their bearing on other parts of the witness's evidence. ~ H.C. Nicholas

Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person - the person's origins and
destiny. There is an implicit anthropology and an implicit theology in every economics. ~ William T. Cavanaugh

What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must ... communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature. ~ Medardo Rosso

Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. ~ Baruch Spinoza

Study not man in his animal nature - man following the laws of the jungle - but study man in all his glory. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against Nature must lead to their own downfall. ~ Adolf Hitler

...every physicist knows that the laws of physics can be used to build a gun or a bicycle; physics does not dictate a specific use for its laws. To that extent, it should be obvious that the laws of physics are incomplete in predicting everything that occurs in nature
- from Moral Materialism ~ Ashish Dalela

If a child is inclined to be grasping, or to cling to any of his or her little possessions, legends are related about the contempt and disgrace falling upon the ungenerous and mean person ... ~ Charles Alexander Eastman

Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous. ~ Nelson Goodman

Sensory deprivation has a devastating psychological impact and can lead to the complete dissolution of the personality accompanied by hallucinations, delusional thinking and general incoherence. It is presently acknowledged as a form of torture; in fact, it is one of a group of "enhanced techniques" that are entirely psychological in nature and unique in that they do not conform to the general public understanding of what torture is. ~ Brian Moss

When they told me in the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. ~ Jojo Moyes

The true fountains of evidence [are] the head and heart of every rational and honest man. It is there nature has written her moral laws, and where every man may read them for himself. ~ Thomas Jefferson

One of the credos of my life is taken from Viktor Frankl, a Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who was a psychiatrist and author. In his highly influential book, Man's Search for Meaning, he related that after the war someone asked him if he 'hated the German race.' He responded that he did not because in his view, 'There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.' That is how I divide the world. Not between Muslim and non-Muslim, black and white, or American and non-American, but between the decent and indecent. The issues I raise about Islam are not about the decency of Muslims, but about whether Islam in its traditional Islamist configuration is more or less likely than the American value system to produce good societies. ~ Dennis Prager

LTCM lost money when Russia defaulted on a certain class of bonds, and then they had other investments like on the spread between two different kinds of shares of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. Now that seems completely unrelated to Russian bonds. But they were related because other hedge funds saw similar discrepancies and they were all making similar bets. ~ Richard Thaler

...I couldn't care less what the colours are in reality. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Was humanity, or even life itself, that significant in the grand scheme of things? Wasn't humanity's survival directly related to nature's decline? ~ M.R. Mathias

Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence. ~ Jan Smuts

Ah, Toulouse, you have travelled too much. You know the gods of a hundred lands, those of the trees and mountains, the sky and sea, the stars and planets, of demons and angels, and even the Master of the Cosmos. But I am speaking of God. There are others, I'm sure, but only one God who created even great Zeus and Rama. Yet travel is like philosophy: a few years of it will perk the eye to differences, which you shall be able to notice with ease. Yet living as I have, travelling to lonely lands and through a thousand metropolises and hidden woods, you rather see the similarities. All becomes one, and God too becomes one. Not the sum of all those gods here, but beyond them, a being few philosophers have truly grasped. He has always been one, but he is severed in our minds. So it is up to us to piece him back together. If our souls possess a clarity beyond what our mortal nature can bestow, we shall see him. ~ Mary-Jean Harris

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own. ~ Arthur Erickson

It's okay to be addicted to beauty," Mom says, all dreamy. "Emerson said 'beauty is God's handwriting. ~ Jandy Nelson

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature. ~ Cyril Connolly

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run. ~ Isaac Asimov

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them? ~ Rose Kennedy

We don't know nearly enough about the complexities of Nature. If we think we can eliminate natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, i.e. clean air or water with fusion energy - we are kidding ourselves. ~ E. O. Wilson

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence? ~ Joshua Foer

Custom ... changes the very nature of things; and what was honorable a thousand years ago, may probably be looked upon as infamous now. ~ Charlotte Lennox

Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don't think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we'd seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them
it's very interesting. It still holds up, and it's still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air. ~ Martin Scorsese

The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. ~ Rollo May

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design. ~ Oliver Sacks

Just as the calm unruffled lake, mirrors the beauty of a scene, I would reflect to those who read, the joys of love and life serene". ~ P. J. Peters

Voting on things is democratic, yes - but not on deciding on whether or not people should be equal or have human rights. That isn't democracy, it is mob rule.

Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy. ~ Christina Engela