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 glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be."
"We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually."
"Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature."
"Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature."
"Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends her all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment."
"The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature."
"Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same."
"There is no man of Nature's worth In the circle of the earth."
"Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers."
"Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason."
"Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir."
"The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation."
"In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect."
"The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus."
"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it."
"The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation,--a dominion such as now is beyond his dream of God,--he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight."
"Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running back."
"Nature, as we know her, is no saint.... She comes eating and drinking and sinning."
"Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a luster which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time."
"Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods!"
