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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"When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet."
"Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do."
"Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic."
"No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times."
"Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had."
"Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours."
"The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further."
"We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity."
"Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature."
"Man is embedded in nature."
"We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest."
"Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men."
"Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote."
"Over our manhood bend the skies; Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our ages drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea."
"The natural alone is permanent. Fantastic idols may be worshipped for a while; but at length they are overturned by the continual and silent progress of Truth, as the grim statues of Copan have been pushed from their pedestals by the growth of forest-trees, whose seeds were sown by the wind in the ruined walls."
"Nature loves to hide."
"Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics."
"As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name."
"There is no solitude in nature."
"Even now, nature is the only flame, on which the poetic spirit feeds; from it alone it draws all its power, to it alone it speaks even in the artificial, in the man engaged in culture."
