Skip to content

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:

I'm a high night flier and a rainbow rider
And a straight-shooting son of a gun.

Hoyt Axton Joy To The World (1971)

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

Carl Sagan Contact (1985)

The end and aim of the Cynic philosophy, as indeed of every philosophy, is happiness, but happiness that consists in living according to nature, and not according to the opinions of the multitude.

Julian

Unfortunately, the balance of nature decrees that a superabundance of dreams is paid for by a growing potential for nightmares.

Peter Ustinov

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

William Hazlitt

Who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word can strike dumb the loquacious, is a genius among those who study nature.

Johann Kaspar Lavater Aphorisms on Man (1788)

Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.

Dejan Stojanovic The Sign and Its Children (2000)

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Dejan Stojanovic

The nature part of human nature is to make copies of ourselves — as it is with any other organism.

Alan Weisman

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)

Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.

Maria Goeppert Mayer

Be sure from nature never to depart;
To copy nature is the task of art.
The noblest poets own her sovereign sway,
And ever follow where she leads the way.

Christopher Pitt Vida's Art of Poetry (1725)

Necessity is the mistress and guardian of Nature.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between times, I occupy myself as best I can.

Cary Grant

Night, the dark widow, came walking on the hills.

Tanith Lee Volkhavaar (1977)

Outside everything was uncannily visible in the light of the full moon, but here in the dark shaded alleys the night was conscious of itself.

Barry Pain

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King (1959)

Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

Eric Hoffer Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

Hobbes clearly proves that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature.

Jonathan Swift On Poetry: Poetry, a Rhapsody (1733)

Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy.

Richard Feynman

Related topics