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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"And then, just when you think that you have experienced all the wonders that this world has to offer, you round a peak and suddenly think you're doing the whole thing over again, but this time on drugs."
"We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!"
"The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force with the conclusion, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selection of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal."
"Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body."
"Every one must be struck with astonishment, when he first beholds one of these vast rings of coral-rock, often many leagues in diameter, here and there surmounted by a low verdant island with dazzling white shores, bathed on the outside by the foaming breakers of the ocean, and on the inside surrounding a calm expanse of water, which, from reflection, is of a bright but pale green color."
"His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered."
"Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow."
"If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it."
"For nature is an image of Grace, and visible miracles are images of the invisible."
"If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation."
"The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd."
"He who finds a thought that lets us a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great peace."
"Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given."
"Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital."
"One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering."
"There is no nature at an instant."
"The only things in my life that compatibly exists with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit."
"We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things."
"Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be."
"Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars."
