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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:

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

John Greenleaf Whittier

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

John von Neumann

Tender is the night
For a broken heart
Who will dry your eyes
When it falls apart

Victoria Legrand Depression Cherry (2015)

Any human behavior, even the most horrible in the light of certain values, is natural because it is permitted by the laws of nature.

Giulio Giorello

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

We rode on the winds of the rising storm,
We ran to the sounds of thunder.
We danced among the lightning bolts
And tore the world asunder.

Robert Jordan Crossroads of Twilight (2003)

Scattered in the wind
Earthboy calls me from my dreams:
Dirt is where the dreams must end.

James Welch

3) Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

Larry Niven

An act against the Constitution is void; an act against natural equity is void.

James Otis Jr. Argument Against the Writs of Assistance (1761)

There’s a day to ride thumb on a thunderhead
There’s a day to make fantasy real
There’s a day to deny and a day to decry
and a day for the man with the wind at his heels!

Mike Scott Book of Lightning (2007)

The Gulf disaster is worse than a terrible oil leak. It’s the product of a failed energy policy that looked at profits before people and environment.

Robert Redford

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (1818)

Burke said with a depth that it is impossible to admire enough that art is man’s nature: yes, undoubtedly, man with all his affections, all his knowledge, all his arts, is truly the man of nature, and the weaver’s web is as natural as the spider’s.

Joseph de Maistre Against Rousseau (1795)

The opposite of nature is impossible.

Buckminster Fuller

The night of the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.

Robert G. Ingersoll The Great Infidels (1881)

The Night is Mother of the Day,
The Winter of the Spring,
And ever upon old Decay
The greenest mosses cling.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Future markets, holy wars
Been tried ten thousand times before
If you think that god is keeping score, hooray!

Conor Oberst Cassadaga (2007)

All night I lay awake beside you,
Leaning on my elbow, watching your
Sleeping face, that face whose purity
Never ceases to astonish me.

Kenneth Rexroth In Defense of the Earth (1956)

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

Thomas Campbell The Pleasures of Hope (1799)

For me to love you now
Would be the sweetest thing,
'Twould make me sing,
Ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

Donovan Catch The Wind (1965)

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