Nature quotes
3.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside nature — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume."
"Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. As in agriculture a good soil is first sought for, then a skilful husbandman, and then good seed; in the same way nature corresponds to the soil, the teacher to the husbandman, precepts and instruction to the seed."
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS"
"Nature, like us is sometimes caught without her diadem."
"The colours of insects and many smaller animals contribute to conceal them from the larger ones which prey upon them. Caterpillars which feed on leaves are generally green; and earth-worms the colour of the earth which they inhabit; butter-flies, which frequent flowers, are coloured like them; small birds which frequent hedges have greenish backs like the leaves, and light-coloured bellies like the sky, and are hence less visible to the hawk who passes under them or over them."
"Novembers days are thirty: Novembers earth is dirty, Those thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on ground are the paths.... Few care for the mixture of earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as mud."
"Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone."
"It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact."
"Art may make a suite of clothes, but nature must produce a man."
"It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something."
"The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current."
"Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day."
"We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory."
"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."
"Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience."
"I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay."
"The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants."
"Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite."
"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."
"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."
