The Nature Of Man Quotes

The nature of man is that, he is glad to hear his goodness. ~ Hakim Mohammed Said

Perhaps it is the nature of man not to wish to know too much about his own nature. ~ Roger Ebert

after doing a good deed, assured me that all the credit belonged to me and that those many people who nowadays taught and preached that the individual good deed was of no significance were wrong. I was also very anxious to talk for a while. '"Whoever attacks individual 'charity'," I began, "attacks the nature of man and despises his personal dignity. But the organization of 'public charity' and the question of personal freedom are two different questions and are not mutually exclusive. Individual kindness will always remain, because it is a need of the personality, a living need for the direct influence of one personality on another. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who "make a desolation and call it peace") at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn't Philip of Macedon's first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn't Alexander's last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying. ~ Thomas Cahill

The philosophy of rationalism has misunderstood the nature of man, the nature of the social world, and the nature of reason itself. It does not see that man's nature has three dimensions: biological, rational, and spiritual. By neglecting the biological impulses and spiritual aspirations of man, it misconstrues the function reason fulfills within the whole of human existence; it distorts the problem of ethics, especially in the political field; and it perverts the natural sciences into an instrument of social salvation for which neither their own nature nor the nature of the social world fits them. ~ Hans J. Morgenthau

Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence, ~ Max Picard

Man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man, and by behaving in conformity with which, man may enjoy his true freedom. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature. ~ Eric Voegelin

The only problem with her is that she is too perfect. She is bad in a way that entices, and good in a way that comforts. She is mischief but then she is the warmth of home. The dreams of the wild and dangerous but the memories of childhood and gladness. She is perfection. And when given something perfect, it is the nature of man to dedicate his mind to finding something wrong with it and then when he is able to find something wrong with it, he rejoices in his find, and sees only the flaw, becoming blind to everything else! And this is why man is never given anything that is perfect, because when given the imperfect and the ugly, man will dedicate his mind to finding what is good with the imperfect and upon finding one thing good with the extremely flawed, he will only see the one thing good, and no longer see everything that is ugly. And so....man complains to God for having less than what he wants... but this is the only thing that man can handle. Man cannot handle what is perfect. It is the nature of the mortal to rejoice over the one thing that he can proudly say that he found on his own, with no help from another, whether it be a shadow in a perfect diamond, or a faint beautiful reflection in an extremely dull mirror. ~ C. JoyBell C.

It is in the nature of man that he is antagonistic toward the others of his sex. Each man sees in another a potential competitor for the limited rewards of male success, and the hostility which arises between them is a part of the natural balance of human life.
It is possible, as in the case of father and son, that a closeness will arise between two men which threatens the functional hostility of each. It is the duty of society to provide an artificial means of encouraging the proper degree of antagonism. ~ C.S. Friedman

I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men - while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? ~ Thomas Mann

It is the character of lived experience I want to explore, not the nature of man. ~ Michael James Jackson

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose. ~ Stephen R. Covey

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man. ~ Tacitus

Men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is denied us. ~ Francois Rabelais

We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater. ~ Swami Vivekananda

It is not in the nature of man to bear the cross, to love the cross, to keep under the body and to bring it into subjection, to fly from honours, to bear reproaches meekly, to despise self and desire to be despised, to bear all adversities and losses, and to desire no prosperity in this world. ~ Thomas A Kempis

The diversity of mankind is a basic postulate of our knowledge of human beings. But if mankind is diverse and individuated, then how can anyone propose equality as an ideal? Every year, scholars hold Conferences on Equality and call for greater equality, and no one challenges the basic tenet. But what justification can equality find in the nature of man? If each individual is unique, how else can he be made 'equal' to others than by destroying most of what is human in him and reducing human society to the mindless uniformity of the ant heap? ~ Murray Rothbard

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. ~ Ted Williams

Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. If this were not so we should have little excuse for art. Life, raw life, would be more than satisfactory in itself. But it seems to be the nature of man to transform - himself, if possible, and then the world around him - and the technique of this transformation is what we call art. ~ Wright Morris

It's the nature of man to ask questions.
Belgarath ~ David Eddings

I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.
If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

A learned parson, rusting in his cell at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well on the nature of man; will profoundly analyse the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, he knows nothing of man ... He views man as he does colours in Sir Isaac Newton's prism, where only the capital ones are seen; but an experienced dyer knows all their various shades and gradations, together with the result of their several mixtures. ~ Lord Chesterfield

The American experiment is not a theocracy and does not establish an official religion, but the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rooted in a Christian perspective of the nature of government and the nature of man. The challenge of the next millennium will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective. ~ William H. Pryor, Jr.

When you want something with all your heart, that's when you are closest to the Soul of the World ... when you love someone with all your heart, that's when you are transformed."
"Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive ... and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us ... we continue to change as change is the nature of man. No one is "just this way". That is who they are today - it will not be who they are tomorrow. ~ Paulo Coelho

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. ~ Edmund Burke

(Ayn Rand was the godmother of laissez faire capitalism, the Virgin Mary of Libertarianism. She died in 1982. She spent her life attempting to turn selfishness into a religion so that people could claim their greed was grounded in the nature of man. Her heinous ideas and crappy books have given politicians philosophical cover to promote their "greed is good" agenda for decades. ~ Ian Gurvitz

And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man. ~ Chaim Potok

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him. ~ John Steinbeck

Humans naturally reflect their nature upon the nature of their God. So to know a person, just ask what the person thinks about their God. It's either that, or an individual aims to reflect the nature of their God onto themselves; in either case, just ask about the God and you will know the person, or at least, what the person thinks of himself. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Men have two greatest fears: the first fear is the fear of being needed, and the second fear is the fear of not being needed. ~ C. JoyBell C.

We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil's inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires pleasure, not power. Bodily pleasure is the source from which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an angry, frustrated, and hateful person. His thinking becomes distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-destructive attitudes. ~ Alexander Lowen

Christians must revive a centuries-old view of humankind as made in the image of God, the eternal Craftsman, and of work as a source of fulfillment and blessing not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

It is simply that in all life on earth as in all good agriculture there are no short-cuts that by-pass Nature and the nature of man himself and animals, trees, rocks and streams. Every attempt at a formula, a short-cut, a panacea, always ends in negation and destruction. ~ Louis Bromfield

Further, this human responsibility is in the first instance 'not...a task but a gift,...not law but grace'. It expresses itself in 'believing, responsive love' (p.98). So then, 'one who has understood the nature of responsibility has understood the nature of man. Responsibility is not an attribute, it is the "substance" of human existence. It contains everything..., [it is] that which distinguishes man from all other creatures....' (p.50). Therefore 'if responsibility be eliminated, the whole meaning of human existence disappears' (p.258). ~ John R.W. Stott

A passion for the dramatic art is inherent in the nature of man. ~ Edwin Forrest

It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. ~ James Russell Lowell

One eye-witness reported that:
'...it seems more like the celebration of the orgies of Bacchus, than the memory of a pious saint, from the drunken quarrels and obscenities practised on these occasions. So little is there of devotion, or amendment of life or manners, that these places are frequently chosen for the scenes of pitched battles, fought with cudgels, by parties, not only of parishes, but of counties, set in formal array against each other, to revenge some real or supposed injury, and murders are not an unusual result of these meetings.

It is hard to believe that many of those who took part in the fighting had originally gone in a spirit of pilgrimage to a holy well. But very often the two went together, at least in Ireland, and a seriously intended pilgrimage was often followed by boisterous and aggressive behaviour. Dr. Patrick Logan, who has made a modern study of Irish pilgrimages, commented: 'Pilgrims in any age are not noted for their piety, the Canterbury Tales make that clear, but anyone who has ever gone on a pilgrimage knows it is a memorable and enjoyable experience, something which is part of the nature of man. These days pilgrims may be called tourists. ~ Colin Bord

Souls do not wish to be bullied, but gently brought back; such is the nature of man. ~ Saint Francis De Sales

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good. ~ Stanley Kubrick

Nothing cruel is in fact beneficial; for cruelty is extremely hostile to the nature of man, which we ought to follow. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man. ~ Francis Bacon

We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness. ~ Frederic Bastiat

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure. ~ Stanley Kubrick

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The glory of man is that he is a thinking being. It is the nature of man to think and therein he differs from animals ~ Swami Vivekananda

It is a part of the nature of man to resist compulsion. ~ Tacitus

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars. ~ Richard M. Nixon

The cause of all trouble, the root of all sorrow, the dread of every man lies in this one small word - sin. It has crippled the nature of man ... It has caused man to be caught in the devil's trap. ~ Billy Graham

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. ~ Caryll Houselander

The trickiest thing is the nature of man, apparent in everything. ~ Aristophanes

in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject. ~ Allan McLeod Cormack

Most writers on the emotions and on human conduct seem to be treating rather of matters outside nature than of natural phenomena following nature's general laws. They appear to conceive man to be situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom: for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature's order, that he has absolute control over his actions, and that he is determined solely by himself. They attribute human infirmities and fickleness, not to the power of nature in general, but to some mysterious flaw in the nature of man, which accordingly they bemoan, deride, despise, or, as usually happens, abuse: he, who succeeds in hitting off the weakness of the human mind more eloquently or more acutely than his fellows, is looked upon as a seer. [...] Such persons will, doubtless think it strange that I should attempt to treat of human vice and folly geometrically, and should wish to set forth with rigid reasoning those matters which they cry out against as repugnant to reason, frivolous, absurd, and dreadful. However, such is my plan. ~ Baruch Spinoza

It is not the nature of man, as I see it, ever to be quite satisfied with what he has in life ... Contentment tends to breed laxity, but a healthy discontent keeps us alert to the changing needs of our time. ~ Frances Perkins

I wonder if those who live here get used to this beauty."

"Undoubtedly, Magnificence. It is the nature of man to become oblivious to that which is around him daily, ~ Raymond E. Feist

But hell can endure for only a limited period, and life will begin again one day. History may perhaps have
an end; but our task is not to terminate it but to create it, in the image of what we henceforth know to be
true. Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason
for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of
rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy
its hunger for unity, an integral part of the reality whose name is beauty. One can reject all history and yet
accept the world of the sea and the stars. The rebels who wish to ignore nature and beauty are condemned
to banish from history everything with which they want to construct the dignity of existence and of labor.
Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew
how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man
carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions
will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with
unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to
acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world ~ Albert Camus

Have you considered that maybe this is the birth of a new world, that what happens next is a golden opportunity to change the nature of man in a fundamental way?"
"Those are brave words, Tiresias."
"New parents can't afford to be anything but brave, Eddie. ~ Joe McKinney

It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence. ~ Criss Jami

It is an oftentimes dangerous world, and not all of the people in it are nice, sweet and benevolent. It is the nature of man to behave otherwise, and we must find leaders who can show us a better way and still maintains a balanced view. ~ Mike Medavoy

Cursed is everyone who places his hope in changing the nature of man ~ Saint Augustine

Among intellectuals who consider themselves 'scientific,' the phrase 'the nature of man' is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull. ~ Murray Rothbard

What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have. I can think of no more powerful common horizon than that, and that is why putting a Christian friendship at the heart of a marriage relationship can lift it to a level that no other vision for marriage approaches. ~ Timothy Keller

George Orwell was right. There's no greater genius as far as I'm concerned in terms of understanding human nature. I think that a lot of people just believe anything you tell them, and no matter what it is, they just go along with the program. They're perfectly happy to take their pill every day and do what they're told, and work and buy things, and work and buy things, and stay out of any complex emotional situations. And whatever the authorities tell them to do, they do, and whatever the authorities say is the truth, they believe is the truth. ~ George Lucas

Natural Theology says not only look up and look out-it also says look down and look in, and you will find the proofs of the reality of God in the depth of your own nature. ~ Christopher Dawson

I was aware of something stable in his nature. Ha game me a feeling of security, as if nothing I said or did would change his opinion of me. I never found his pleasantries irksome, partly, no doubt, because he was a Viscount, but, partly, too, because I respected his self-discipline. He had very little to laugh about, I thought, and yet he laughed. His gaiety had a background of the hospital and the battlefield. I felt he had some inner reserve of strength which no reverse, however serious, would break down. ~ L.P. Hartley

I mean, if a person acts irresponsibly in his own life, he will pay the consequences. And it's not so much divine retribution as it's built into the law of nature. ~ Pat Robertson

And this accident came about ... ?Through nature's unpredictability not man's incapacity. No errors were committed in our maneuvers. Nevertheless, we can't prevent a loss of balance from taking its toll. One may defy human laws, but no one can withstand the laws of nature. ~ Jules Verne

Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. ~ Joseph Brodsky

In the mass of people, vegetative and animal functions dominate. Their energy of intelligence is so feeble and inconstant that it is constantly overpowered by bodily appetite and passion.Such persons are not truly ends in themselves, for only reason constitutes a final end. Like plants, animals and physical tools, they are means, appliances, for the attaining of ends beyond themselves, although unlike them they have enough intelligence to exercise a certain discretion in the execution of the tasks committed to them. Thus by nature, and not merely by social convention, there are those who are slaves - that is, means for the ends of others. ~ John Dewey

Tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. ~ Hugh Howey

The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath - no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again. ~ M.C. Beaton

The nature of the Absolute is neither perceptible nor imperceptible; and with phenomena it is just the same. But to one who has discovered his real nature, how can there be anywhere or anything separate from it? ... Therefore it is said: 'The perception of a phenomenon IS the perception of the Universal Nature, since phenomena and Mind are one and the same.' ~ Huangbo Xiyun

I think it's going to be remembered as the last major war on planet Earth, if we're lucky, if we maintain our foreign policy properly ... It will be remembered as the last time major countries had to put people in the field and put them in harm's way. It may be the last of all human nature wars, which is a nice way to remember any kind of a war, as the last one. ~ Tom Clancy

We could sit here and get super-high and talk about the illusory nature of reality, drawing back the veil, and so on, but what I'm learning is this: that loving anything or anyone this much requires you to hold conflicting thoughts in your head and heart. I want to look at [my daughter's] dear, dear little face forever; [but] nothing lasts forever...I will die, her father will die, my little family that is the whole heart of me is the tiniest of tiny blips in the sweep of space and time. We are nothing. We are part of something so grand we cannot hope to apprehend it. We are all lost. We are all floating in space. We were never lost. We will go home. ~ Emily Flake

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet, and the sound of the running streams by my side. The hum of the wind in the tree-tops has always been good music to me, and the face of the fields has often comforted me more than the faces of men. ~ John Burroughs

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind. ~ Gustav Stresemann

After all, Rutherford had as deep a sense of the mysteries of nature as Einstein. And the human spirit expresses itself as eloquently in the work of human hands as in the work of human minds. Rutherford was supreme as an experimenter and Einstein was supreme as a theorist, but each of them held the other in deep respect. Both of them understood that the human spirit is at its best when hands and minds are working together. ~ Freeman Dyson

We all have a dual nature,some of us are just better able to control the energy we expend on each part of it." Lessons for an Urban Goddess ~ Laney Zukerman

My favorite times were spent in his backyard where he and his roommates had "let nature take its course," the weeds towering above our heads. We placed two chairs in the middle of that jungle and discussed what we didn't know we were discussing: What brings a writer and an engineer together? How can we reconcile our diverse interests into a pointed goal, a single aphorism on life? More simply stated: Why are we falling in love? ~ Megan Rich

One UniVerse for the Living

While palaces attest to the power of men,
And monuments mark their wars,
Little remains of the women who've been-
Except for the sons that they bore.
But the voices of women were baked into bread
And later buttered with epics
While the souls of their daughters
Stitched with fine thread
Became tapestries stored in attics.
And all through the ages
Men boasted like beasts
Erecting pillars of marble and stone,
But still they found themselves only to be
Sculpted of flesh and bone.
Philosophers pondered the nature of gods
Outlawing temptations that plagued them
And earning themselves, against all odds,
The power to punish the pagans.
By writing themselves into sacred books
The clergymen sealed our fate
To follow decrees that have their roots
In nothing but misguided hate.
So, children of Adam and invisible Eve,
challenge the wisdom of sages.
Don't be so sure sacred scrolls that you read
Aren't filled with human pages.
Walk in the wilderness.
Eat of the fruit.
Don't let them buy you with wages.
Plant your own garden.
Drink of the wine.
Learn how to be courageous.
Hearts that are hardened
To what is divine
Have honored the dead too long.
Search for the stories
Baked into bread
And eat until you are strong. ~ Nancy Boutilier

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.
The Nature of Emotions (2001) ~ Robert Plutchik

If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television. ~ Gerald Durrell

When you experience the light, voila, you're happy. The very nature of the light is happiness. You don't have to do anything or be anybody special. ~ Frederick Lenz

I do not bother my head with speculations about the nature of God. I simply attach myself to the human Christ, ~ Martin Luther

... by treating nature as exterior and inferior to humans we saw no harm to ourselves in polluting the soil, the plants, the air and the water. We did not notice the effect of our pollution on whatever walked over it, ran across it, climbed up it, flew through it, or swam in it.

Now we notice that harming other constituents of our planetary system brings harm to ourselves. ~ Betty Jean Craige

I don't really believe anything I say. Because the nature of my work concerns the spaces between the words, rather than the words themselves. ~ Ram Dass

Every step in the progress of this study has tended to obliterate the technical barriers by which logicians have sought to separate the inquiries relating to the several parts of man's nature. ~ Richard Owen

The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

O change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. ~ Jeanette Winterson

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. ~ Octavio Paz