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Nature Quotes

The page runs from Shakespeare and Milton through Longfellow, Wordsworth and Thomas Moore, so most of it is poetry from before 1900. Two of the best-sourced lines are in prose. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605), uses the sun passing through pollutions and remaining as pure as before. Einstein, in an essay for Leo Baeck (1953), says joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Three entries are flagged misattributed: a couplet about old Hoghton and pale moonlight credited to William Hazlitt, a remark that kites rise against, not with, the wind, credited to Lewis Mumford, and “You can’t just let nature run wild,” credited to Walt Disney.

Random quote on Nature

Most quoted on nature:

Who is there, my friend, can climb to the sky?
Only the gods dwell forever in sunlight.
As for man, his days are numbered,
whatever he may do, it is but wind.

Gilgamesh

The rigour of science requires that we distinguish well the undraped figure of Nature itself from the gay-coloured vesture with which we clothe her at our pleasure.

Heinrich Hertz

Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can't think of it.

Arthur C. Clarke The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

Storm clouds of terror and dictatorship are gathering over the whole country... They must not be allowed to bring eternal night.

Boris Yeltsin

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Philip K. Dick What The Dead Men Say (1964)

And to me it seems that you have fallen asleep upon a white rock, and in a parish of dreams, and have dreamt all this in a moment while it was night.

Anatole France The White Stone (1905)

Know, Nature, like the cuckoo, laughs at law,
Placing her eggs in whatso nest she will.

Alfred Austin Savonarola (1881)

What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door?

Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469) (1485)

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

Michel de Montaigne Essais (1571)

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.

Garrison Keillor The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts : A Felicitous Look at Felines‎ (1997)

There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.

Wallace Stevens The Necessary Angel (1951)

When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.

Albert Hofmann LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug? (2006)

The ability to store energy from renewable sources — the sun, the wind — opens up for sustainable energy consumption.

Sara Snogerup Linse Sara Snogerup Linse (2019)

If we once — and for so long — lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that’s overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history.

John Zerzan

Messenger, by night, drive on like the south wind! By day, be up like the dew!

Enmerkar

Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in Nature.

Samuel Johnson Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it.

Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders.

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

Nature is like a woman worthy of being placed on a pedestal. In order fully to understand and appreciate her, it is necessary to live with her a long time in intimate proximity.

Victor Lebrun

Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.

Morihei Ueshiba Budo (1938)

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