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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"We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources ... But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted."
"Knowledge and personality make doubt possible, but knowledge is also the cure of doubt; and when we get a full and adequate sense of personality we are lifted into a region where doubt is almost impossible, for no man can know himself as he is, and all fullness of his nature, without also knowing God."
"If you live according to nature, you never will be poor; if according to the world's caprice, you will never be rich."
"Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy-that he live in accordance with his own nature."
"Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything."
"My spiritual connection with nature is basically what we all have - you transcend yourself. It's what happens when you see a sunset, for example. If I were using a traditional religious term, I'd say I was connecting with God. For me, I feel that much more in nature than in a city."
"Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live."
"Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner. We can but solve the mystery by deducing the unknown result from the known results of similar events."
"Not for any one man's delight has Nature made the sun, the wind, the waters; all are free."
"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."
"Art is man added to Nature."
"The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success."
"Nature insists on whatever benefits the whole."
"Serious harm, I am afraid, has been wrought to our generation by fostering the idea that they would live secure in a permanent order of things."
"Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life."
"Nothing will be left, Nothing in the air, nothing under the earth, nothing in the waters. All will be exterminated."
"To destroy a standing crop goes against the soundest instincts of human nature."
"Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light,--to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure."
"To the sick, indeed, nature is sick, but to the well, a fountain of health."
"I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it."
