Natures Quotes

A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.

This ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls. ~ Victor Hugo

As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray. ~ Thomas Hardy

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart; -
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around -
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air -
Comes a still voice -
Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine etern ~ William Cullen Bryant

NATURE'S LAWS
There are virtues and vices in every person. It's your choice what you want to see. The same will multiply in your life a thousandfold. ~ Sirshree

The root of all evil: that the slavish morality of meekness, chastity, selflessness, absolute obedience, has triumphed - ruling natures were thus condemned (1) to hypocrisy, (2) to torments of conscience - creative natures felt like rebels against God, uncertain and inhibited by eternal values.

In summa: the best things have been slandered because the weak or the immoderate swine have cast a bad light on them - and the best men have remained hidden - and have often misunderstood themselves. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is. ~ Leslie Lamport

The natures and dispositions of men are, not without truth, distinguished from the predominance of the planets. ~ Francis Bacon

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. ~ Michael Pollan

Nature's Laws are the invisible government of the earth. ~ Alfred Armand Montapert

Children are God's or nature's practical joke on couples - that which is produced by passion then proceeds to nearly kill it. ~ Dennis Prager

To maintain our own economy,we are disturbing the nature's economy ~ Siddharth Seksaria

They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures - ~ A.S. Byatt

Angry and choleric men are as ungrateful and unsociable as thunder and lightning, being in themselves all storm and tempest; but quiet and easy natures are like fair weather, welcome to all. ~ Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think, - 'Enough,
Enough of life in so much! - here's a cause
For rupture; - herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!'
- And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended. - Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around .
Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life's voice! - still, we make our peace with Life. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned.Their tongues are separate in speech,And their natures as well;Their skins are distinguished,As thou distinguishest the foreign peoples.Thou makest a Nile in the underworld,Thou bringest forth as thou desirestTo maintain the peopleAccording as thou madest them for thyself,The lord of all of them, wearying with them,The lord of every land, rising for them,The Aton of the day, great of majesty. ~ Akhenaton

If we want sincere harmony, peace and joy in our lives, we can have them, but we must be willing to do the work. We must make maintaining an awareness of our spiritual natures first in our lives. Our inner world is the architect of our external world. We don't lose faith in the goodness of life because we become angry and depressed. We become angry and depressed because we lose faith in the goodness of life. ~ Susan L. Taylor

Special natures you must give a special world. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We're not going to allow gay people to adopt children, that's against nature, it's against nature's God. ~ William Anthony Donohue

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it. ~ Jessa Crispin

All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence ... I had to place myself amidst the variation. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

All the quantum physics experiments have occurred chiefly on the atomic scale and we are taught to believe that nature's laws are consistent. ~ Mitch Horowitz

Communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought - frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

-jeez, these guys, with their on-again, off-again rela­tionships, lutgen said;
-Yeah, Dave said: now you see them, now you see them once more;
-They're virtual insects!, Jurgen said;
-Virtually innumerable, said Dave;
-I wonder, though, if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said: I mean, I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing;
-Hm, said Dave: so what they're actually doing is turning off their lights­
-Right: momentarily going under;
-Flashing darkness­
-Projecting their inner voids­
-Their repeating, periodic depressions ...
-So then, I suppose, we should really call them douse bugs---;.
-Exactly...
-Or nature's faders---;.
-Flying extinguishers­
-Buzzing snuffers-!
-Or maybe­
-Or maybe, despite what it looks like, maybe they really are glowing constantly, Jurgen said: but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is peri­odically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces;
-So then they're being occluded­
-Rudely occluded­
-Denied their God-given right to shine ...
-So that, I suppose, would make them-o horror-victims­
-Yeah: victims of predatory darkness­
-Of uncontrollable flares of night;
-So it isn't bioluminescence, but eco-eclipsis­
-Exactly: ambient effacement­
-Nature's station-identification­
-Ongoing lessons in humility ...
Evan Dara

Yes, the worst parasites. We reproduce with no internal limitations. We consume and destroy and make war. We have no predator except ourselves, and left unchecked we destroy ourselves every time. And we destroy the planet along with us. Humankind is the thing that must be contained. Man must be checked. We were nature's mistake - the only species worth extinction is our very own. ~ Ryan Winfield

NATURE'S LAWS
That for which you express gratitude increases in your life. ~ Sirshree

We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures - the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image - for blame is always easier than shame. ~ Maria Popova

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change. ~ Howard Bloom

[On STDs] This be Nature's way of recommending monogamy. ~ Martin Amis

Nana always said the rain was Nature's way of adding sparkle to the outdoors. ~ Evangeline Duran Fuentes

If you violate Nature's laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. ~ Luther Burbank

Walking in darkness didn't mean having to become one with it, did it? Could we not live with our inner natures without embracing the true evil we all are privy to? Humans are no less evil than the worst of vampires at times. Surely right and wrong couldn't be so perfectly cut and dried. ~ Trina M. Lee

Design that mimics the sensual continuity of nature's subtle connections of color, light and texture invite the viewer's receptivity. ~ Maggie Macnab

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. ~ C.S. Lewis

The world, however bleak I have found it in the last few weeks, must nonetheless be formed of goodness, if but a few moments in Nature's company may suffice to renew one's health and mental aspect. ~ Stephanie Barron

Since by definition learning is change, when you learn nature's lessons, you are changed. ~ Ron Lizzi

Men and women alike possess the qualities which make a guardian; they differ only in their comparative strength or weakness. Obviously. And those women who have such qualities are to be selected as the companions and colleagues of men who have similar qualities and whom they resemble in capacity and in character? Very true. And ought not the same natures to have the same pursuits? They ought. Then, as we were saying before, there is nothing unnatural in assigning music and gymnastic to the wives of the guardians - to that point we come round again. Certainly not. The law which we then enacted was agreeable to nature, and therefore not an impossibility or mere aspiration; and the contrary practice, which prevails at present, is in reality a violation of nature. That appears to be true. We ~ Plato

The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights. ~ Vandana Shiva

I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of."
...
"I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us."
...
"I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

Our animal friends' non-reactive and forgiving natures can teach us positive spiritual lessons on a daily basis. ~ Eckhart Tolle

There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all ... It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe ... The impression of design is overwhelming. ~ Paul Davies

Nature's a tranquilizer as you get older. ~ Willard Scott

Look abroad through Nature's range, Nature's mighty law is change. ~ Robert Burns

We're only lucky enough to see the wonders of nature's canyons because they're gracious enough to show us the places they've been damaged. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. ~ Peggy Noonan

I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. We must return to nature and nature's God. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Darwin's Bestiary

PROLOGUE


Animals tame and animals feral
prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral:
the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile,
rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile.
Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride - every peril
was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural,
while Courage, Devotion, Thrift - every bright laurel
crowned a creature in some mythological mural.


Scientists think there is something immoral
in singular brutes having meat that is plural:
beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral.
Yet between the lines there's an implicit demurral;
the habit stays with us, albeit it's puerile:
when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel.



1. THE ANT


The ant, Darwin reminded us,
defies all simple-mindedness:
Take nothing (says the ant) on faith,
and never trust a simple truth.
The PR men of bestiaries
eulogized for centuries
this busy little paragon,
nature's proletarian -
but look here, Darwin said: some ants
make slaves of smaller ants, and end
exploiting in their peonages
the sweating brows of their tiny drudges.


Thus the ant speaks out of both
sides of its mealy little mouth:
its example is extolled
to the workers of the world,
but its habits also preach
the virtues of ~ Philip Appleman

The flowers are Nature's jewels, with whose wealth she decks her summer beauty. ~ George Croly

At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope - that the good fortune of others might one day be hers ~ Katherine Boo

Tempered, gradual animation, the methodical restrain of sensations and energies, the equilibrium of sickness and health in each creature
this is nature's essence, its immutable law, this is what it's based on and what it adheres to. ~ Ivan Turgenev

I'd Like to See
-----------------

I'd like to see the red
Of the roses in full bloom.
I'd like to see the silver
Of sun's reflection on the moon.

I'd like to see the blue
Of the ocean when it's roaring.
I'd like to see the brown
Of the eagle when it's soaring.

I'd like to see the purple
Of grapes hanging on the vine.
I'd like to see the yellow
Of the sun in summertime.

I'd like to see the russet
Of the chestnuts on the tree.
I'd like to see the faces
Of those that smile at me. ~ Lucinda Riley

How often we forget all time, when lone Admiring Nature's universal throne; Her woods - her wilds - her mountains - the intense Reply of HERS to OUR intelligence! ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded, But must be current, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partaken bliss. ~ John Milton

We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that. ~ James Balog

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature's most effective protection is the frailty of humanity, its work and its activities. The consequences of its activities must sooner or later bring about its own demise for the greater part of its present endeavours contravenes every principle of Nature. Hence, it is merely a question of the efficacy of humanity's activities and of the attainment of a particular level of culture which determines when the reaction sets in; when all that has been built up with so much care and sweat must once more collapse upon itself. Once humanity has reached this point, Nature will rid herself effortlessly of her greatest enemy and with renewed energy will rebuild all that humanity has destroyed. ~ Viktor Schauberger

In natures, we see God, as it were, like the sun in a picture; in the law, as the sun in a cloud; in Christ we see Him in His beams; He being 'the brightness of His glory, and the exact image of His person. ~ Stephen Charnock

Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administrating stimulants to an exhausted nervous system. ~ Sam Keen

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement
but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims. ~ Joseph Conrad

The physician is only nature's assistant. ~ Galen

To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world - an ability denied to any other physical being. ~ Kenan Malik

I live to hold communion With all that is divine, To feel there is a union Twixt Natures heart and mine. ~ George Linnaeus Banks

Our natures lie in motion, without which we die. ~ Blaise Pascal

Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers. ~ Matthew Arnold

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. ~ Andre Breton

Haiku are meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader ... to light the spark that triggers creative rumination ... They act as literary manifestations ... visions of nature's seasonal modulations ... They're emotionally tinged words, barely perceptible sensory flickers ... literary etchings of lucid visions transposed into the minds of its readers ... They're meant to act as sensory catalysts ... like the passing of a penciled baton laid out upon a piece of paper that a reader might grasp for in their mind's eye ... all of which prompts the reader to continue exploring the sensory experience elicited from the writers pen ... This is how the literary sketching of poets are intended to function ... as creative muses with which readers can draw from and viscerally apply to their own artistic idioms ... from that lucid space within their heads ... where their minds eye can spark their own creative visions"

Bukusai Ashagawa ~ Bukusai Ashagawa

Or perhaps it is a matter of those despised parts of our natures that are normally frittered away as harmless foibles giving rise in times of war to monsters. ~ Kanan Makiya

Just as legendary rivers were used to represent the flow of life, so Mount Athos is a handy image to show human vulnerability. Its minerals themselves reminding us that ours is a planet constituted around Nature's awesome violence! Struggling to survive then, is integral to our existence. Literature on these issues, transforming rock and boulder into a subjective mountain, where fleshly mountaineers set forth, in the blinding brilliance of an alpine dawn, to ascend their own transgressions, remains telling. Breathing in, when nearing the top, to smell the pure air of spiritual comprehension: of heady intrinsic freedom, only to descend, once more, into the obscure and the pedestrian; albeit existentially transformed! In this way, indeed, Mount Athos transfigures many a man. ~ David William Parry

Many of Nature's finest lessons are to be found in her storms, and if careful to keep in right relations with them, we may go safely abroad with them, rejoicing in the grandeur and beauty of their works and ways. ~ John Muir

The prospect of death is nature's way of encouraging us to strive for greatness. ~ Antonio Kowatsch

To Solitude
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,
Nature's observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. ~ John Keats

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. ~ Norbert Wiener

The planet's witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty.
Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate.
The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature's age-old habits. They're made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

Human beings are not nature's favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. ~ Camille Paglia

I have shaken loose. Like the lily, I rest on the deep water's surface. Not knowing the journey's end, I rest in nature's embrace. ~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Those who make pictures of the Savior, who is God as well as man in one inseparable person, either limit the incomprehensible Godhead to the bounds of created flesh, or confound his two natures like Eutyches, or separate them, like Nestorius, or deny his Godhead, like Arius; and those who worship such a picture are guilty of the same heresy and blasphemy. ~ Philip Schaff

Games are nature's most beautiful creation ~ Leonard Cohen

Children are nature's flower and our future. They are the future fathers and mothers. They are our mind's adventure in the future. ~ Debasish Mridha

Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects.... ~ Alfred North Whitehead

It's beautiful," said Mort softly. "What is it?"
THE SUN IS UNDER THE DISC, said Death.
"Is it like this every night?"
EVERY NIGHT, said Death. NATURE'S LIKE THAT.
"Doesn't anyone know?"
ME. YOU. THE GODS. GOOD, ISN'T IT?
"Gosh!"
Death leaned over the saddle and looked down at the kingdoms of the world.
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, he said, BUT I COULD MURDER A CURRY. ~ Terry Pratchett

If you look at eggs, you will see that each one is almost round but not quite ... Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls. ~ Robert Benchley

In politics and in society, we can use our reason to rise above our parochial natures. Too bad that our elected officials don't choose to do so more often. ~ Paul Bloom

A great Awakening has begun. People around the world are opening their eyes to their own spiritual natures. They are beginning to see who they truly are and what they have always been-beings with an eternal past and a glorious future. ~ Betty Eadie

But first let me mention the second aid to understanding provided by science. We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience. This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity in in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature's answer, depends on the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature in itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of what is characteristically ours, a bit of the human subject. This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it generates the center of individuality; and the more it engages the beholder's individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in pure objectivity. Thus, whenever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond the prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen victim to self-deception. This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality ~ Benedict XVI

I find beauty in the continual shaping of chaos which clearly embodies the primordial power of nature's performance ~ Iris Van Herpen

Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species. ~ Nigel Hamilton

Giving Birth by Marcus Amaker

do you remember
when the earth was just a baby,
settling in its skin,
safe in the arms of mother nature
with fire breathing from within.
you were not shackled by time
and life roamed around your heart
with the weight of dinosaurs,
leaving footprints in your lungs.
and the first time you saw the sun
you could barely breathe
because the possibility of endless light
planted a seed
so you admire the strength of trees,
who naturally grew into
unwavering beauty,
staring down the mouth of
time.

do you remember being 11 years old
when your mother told you
"birth is more painful than dying"
and you burst with dreams
without even trying,
seeking light in your heart,
where shadows now rest
comfortably next to fear.
but you come out of the woods clear,
with nature's breath
under your tongue,
and a weightless bliss,
no longer scared of
death. ~ Marcus Amaker

It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Unless the grace of God comes to the help of our frailty, to protect and defend it, no man can withstand the insidious onslaughts of the enemy nor can he damp down or hold in check the fevers which burn in our flesh with nature's fire. ~ John Cassian

My argument has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive. ~ Camille Paglia

Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. ~ Louie Schwartzberg

The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity taught that there are multiple (three) persons, but they all share one nature in the Godhead, preserving monotheism. Conversely, the personhood of Christ shares multiple (two) natures - God and man, timeless and subject to time, invisible and visible - yet he is one person.15 ~ Justin S. Holcomb

Only a fool believes that nature's only purpose is to serve and obey. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not. ~ George Eliot

In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all. ~ Aristotle.