Quotes
Quotes about Nature
Sympathy is a virtue unknown in nature.
What's a' your jargon o' your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools; If honest nature made you fools.
Of a nature so mild and benign and proportioned to the human constitution as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate. (Tar Water.)
Impostor; do not charge most innocent Nature, As if she would her children should be riotous With her abundance; she, good cateress, Means her provision only to the good, That live according to her sober laws, And holy dictate of spare temperance.
Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which needs No school of long experience, that the world Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen Enough of all its sorrows, crimes and cares, To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood And view the haunts of Nature. The calm shade Shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm To thy sick heart.
Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,-- And the drops will slacken so; Weep, weep--and the watch thou keepest, With a quicker count will go. Think,--the shadow on the dial For the nature most undone, Marks the passing of the trial, Proves the presence of the sun.
See, here's a shadow found; the human nature Is made th' umbrella to the Deity, To catch the sunbeams of thy just Creator; Beneath this covert thou may'st safely lie.
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them. . . . May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets "with a lie in their right hand?" . . . Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed--have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and strunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.
The plastic virtues: Purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few personsnearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousands times worse than nothing.
In nature there's no blemish but the mind; None can be called deformed but the unkind.
Written about Washington after his death by another of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson: His mind was great and powerful ... as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.... Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw doubt, but, when once decided, going through his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was the most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known.... He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good and a great man ... On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect ... it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great....
Vain? Let it be so! Nature was her teacher, What if a lovely and unsistered creature Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows That for oblivion that their daily birth From all the fuming vanities of earth.
The learned pate Ducks to the golden fool. All's obliquy; There's nothing level in our cursed natures But direct villainy.
If there's a power above us, (and that there is all nature cries aloud Through all her works) he must delight in virtue.
Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul, Is the best gift of Heaven: a happiness That even above the smiles and frowns of fate Exalts great Nature's favourites: a wealth That ne'er encumbers, nor can be transferr'd.
Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.
Nature does not loathe virtue: it is unaware of its existence.
Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.
