Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leonardo da Vinci

I say that the power of vision extends through the visual rays to the surface of non-transparent bodies, while the power possessed by these bodies extends to the power of vision.

Leonardo da Vinci

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

Leonardo da Vinci

Nature never breaks her own laws.

Leonardo da Vinci

... we might say that the earth has a spirit of growth; that its flesh is the soil, its bones the arrangement and connection of the rocks of which the mountains are composed, its cartilage the tufa, and its blood the springs of water.

Oscar Wilde

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Oscar Wilde

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.

Paul Gauguin

I plunged eagerly and passionately into the wilderness, as if in the hope of thus penetrating into the very heart of this Nature, powerful and maternal, there to blend with her living elements.

Paul Gauguin

Wherever I go I need a period of incubation so that I may learn the essence of nature, which never wishes to be understood or yield herself.

Patch Adams

Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers. The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.

Pam Brown

For every person who has ever lived there has come, at last, a spring he will never see. Glory then in the springs that are yours.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I can pass days Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees, Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,-- The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs, Each tree a natural harp,--each different leaf A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving.

Leon Trotsky

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.

Leigh Hunt

Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great any of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color.

John Gould

What I love about the currawongs is the way in which they appear from nowhere and, for a brief period, rule the garden's soundscape, only to disappear as quickly as they arrived.

John Greenleaf Whittier

There is religion in everything around us, - a calm and holy religion in the unbreathing things of Nature, which man would do well to imitate.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Nature eschews regular lines; she does not shape her lines by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and picturesque inequality of nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying beauty.

John Greenleaf Whittier

They who wander widest lift No more of beauties' jealous veils, Than they who from their doorways see The miracle of flowers and trees.

Ovid

Not for any one man's delight has Nature made the sun, the wind, the waters; all are free.

Paul Farmer

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

Marya Mannes

Lie down and listen to the crabgrass grow.

Mary Wortley Montagu

Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

Mary Wortley Montagu

I have never, in all my various travels, seen but two sorts of people I mean men and women, who always have been, and ever will be, the same. The same vices and the same follies have been the fruit of all ages, though sometimes under different names.

Mary Wollstonecraft

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

Mary Hunter Austin

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. ... The cunningest hunger is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.

Mary Hunter Austin

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.

Martha Beck

You're exactly where you're meant to be, meandering along a crooked path.

Marshall McLuhan

Current illusion is that science has abolished all natural laws.

R. D. Laing

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.