Nature Quotes - Page 92

The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.

Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.

If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants.

Every man should be responsible to others, nor should any one be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.

When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else.

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

There will always be something new to discover: a minute moss never found before, a rabbit eating birdseed with the bores on a hungry November day, a bittern that stays only long enough to be remembered.

That little burning bush that is the signature of the blog - it echoes Elizabeth Barrett Browning's words.

We listen too much to the telephone and too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing.

Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness ... A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place ... Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

It would indeed be a great delusion, if we stated that those sports of Nature [we find] enclosed in rocks are there by chance or by some vague creative power. Ah, that would be superficial indeed! In reality, those shells, which once were alive in water and are now dead and decomposed, were made thus by time not Nature; and what we now find as very hard, figured stone, was once soft mud and which received the impression of the shape of a shell, as I have frequently demonstrated.