Nature Quotes

We are what we seem to be.

Nature's a tranquilizer as you get older.

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died All Nature was degraded; The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear, And all his pictures faded.

All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.

on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.

Sends Nature forth the daughter of the skies... To dance on earth, and charm all human eyes.

Nature, exerting an unwearied power, Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower; Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.

Learning itself, received into a mind By nature weak, or viciously inclined, Serves but to lead philosophers astray, Where children would with ease discern the way.

When all within is peace How nature seems to smile Delights that never cease The live-long day beguile

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.

A certain excess of animal spirits with thoughtless good-humor will often make more enemies than the most deliberate spite and ill-nature, which is on its guard, and strikes with caution and safety.

Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.

Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.

People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man's thoughts and another's.

The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.

Have you ever considered what anxious thought, what consummate knowledge of human nature, what dearly-bought experiences go into the making of an advertisement?

This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.

Nature is economical. She puts her lights and darks only where she needs them.

Nature is an unpleasing, stupid, lumpy, blowsy wench.

Tis the glory of a man to vail to truth; as it is the mark of a good nature to be easily entreated.

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union.

We are all environmentalists now, but we are not all planetists. An environmentalist realizes that nature has its pleasures and deserves respect. A planetist puts the earth ahead of the earthlings.

But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy, Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great: Of Nature's gifts thou mayst with lilies boast, And with the half-blown rose; but Fortune, O!

And nature must obey necessity.

I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me: but once put out thy light, Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume.

Nature does require her times of preservation.

Nature's tears are reason's merriment.

Plutus himself, That knows the tinct and multiplying med'cine, Hath not in nature's mystery more science Than I have in this ring.

The nature of bad news affects the teller.

I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature.

A Devil, a born Devil on whose nature, nurture can never stick, on whom my pain, humanly taken, all lost, quite lost.

I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature.

Tis often seen Adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds A native slip to us from foreign lands.

I am thy father's spirit; Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night And, for the day, confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes, done in my days of nature, Are burnt and purg'd away.

O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.

Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.

One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.