"If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a colour garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink."
Nature quotes
Nature
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Nature quotes (page 49 of 183)
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"All material Things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid Particles ... variously associated with the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order: and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature."
"As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds."
"In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place."
"As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity."
"In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness."
"One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care. Such is the quality of bees."
"A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within."
"For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread."
"The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder."
"The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery."
"The sun gives spirit and life to the plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture."
"Music cannot be called otherwise than the sister of painting, for she is dependent upon hearing, a sense second to sight, and her harmony is composed of the union of its proportional parts sounded simultaneously, rising and falling in one or more harmonic rhythms."
"Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law."
"What induces you, oh man, to depart from your home in town, to leave parents and friends, and go to the countryside over mountains and valleys, if it is not for the beauty of the world of nature?"
"Given the cause nature produces the effect in the briefest manner that it can employ."
"The eye transmits its own image through the air to all the objects which face it, and also receives them on its own surface, whence the "sensus communis" takes them and considers them."
"Nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world."
"Every action done by nature is done in the shortest way."
"Although human ingenuity may devise various inventions which, by the help of various instruments, answer to one and the same purpose, yet will it never discover any inventions more beautiful, more simple or more practical than those of nature, because in her inventions there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous; and she makes use of no counterpoise when she constructs the limbs of animals in such a way as to correspond to the motion of their bodies, but she puts into them the soul of the body."