Nature Quotes - Page 115

... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.

All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind , As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves.

The natural alone is permanent.

Art is the child of Nature.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.

God showers upon us his gifts-more than enough for all; But like swine scrambling for food, we tread them in the mire, and rend each other.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

Nature is not made after such a fashion as we would have her. We piously exaggerate her wonders, as the scenery around our home.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve.

We can never have enough of Nature.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but findher our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds.

Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

As well expect Nature to answer your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair.

I know no study that will take you nearer the way to happiness than the study of nature - and I include in the study of nature not only things and their forces, but also mankind and their ways, and the moulding of the affections and the will into an earnest desire not only to be happy, but to create happiness.

Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.

I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.

Mother Nature may be forgiving this year, or next year, but eventually she's going to come around and whack you. You've got to be prepared.

The greatest marvel is not in the individual. It is in the succession, in the renewal and in the duration of the species that Nature would seem quite inconceivable. This power of producing its likeness that resides in animals and plants, this form of unity, always subsisting and appearing eternal, this procreative virtue which is perpetually expressed without ever being destroyed, is for us a mystery which, it seems, we will never be able to fathom.

I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow.

I have often had cause to feel that my hands are cleverer than my head. That is a crude way of characterizing the dialectics of experimentation. When it is going well, it is like a quiet conversation with Nature. One asks a question and gets an answer, then one asks the next question and gets the next answer. An experiment is a device to make Nature speak intelligibly. After that, one only has to listen.

nature has not changed. The night is still unsullied, the stars still twinkle, and the wild thyme smells as sweetly now as it did then ... We may be afflicted and unhappy, but no one can take from us the sweet delight which is nature's gift to those who love her and her poetry.