Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick one.

Edgar Lee Masters

O maternal earth which rocks the fallen leaf to sleep!

Edgar Guest

Away from the tumult of motor and mill I want to be care-free; I want to be still! I'm weary of doing things; weary of words I want to be one with the blossoms and birds.

Bobby Jindal

The gist of what Mayor Giuliani said -- that the President has shown himself to be completely unable to speak the truth about the nature of the threats from these ISIS terrorists - is true.

Benjamin Franklin

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

Benjamin Franklin

The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.

Arthur Eddington

Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Arthur Eddington

Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

Arthur C. Clarke

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Anton Chekhov

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.

Anton Chekhov

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

Anton Chekhov

I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.

Anton Chekhov

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Baltasar Gracian

Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art.

Anthony Trollope

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Diane Ackerman

Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.

Diane Ackerman

Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

Desiderius Erasmus

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

Clyde Tombaugh

I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.

Clyde Tombaugh

I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.

Clarence Day

We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.

Elizabeth I

The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.

Arthur Guiterman

What one approves , another scorns, And thus his nature each discloses: You find the rosebush full of thorns, I find the thornbush full of roses.

There are some serious questions about the timing and the nature of this prosecution.

If nothing else, the act of reaching a milestone often serves to reveal a superstar's true nature.

Diane Ackerman

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Brian Jacques

Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.

Jane Jacobs

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

Jane Goodall

People say to me so often, 'Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,' and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.

Jane Goodall

There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.

Jane Goodall

For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.

James Whistler

Nature is usually wrong.