Famous Quotes & Sayings

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Victor Hugo

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, That is the sky.

Victor Hugo

First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.

Victor Hugo

Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.

Victor Hugo

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Vicki Baum

cats will be clean in a pigsty while pigs will be dirty in a marble hall.

Richard Bach

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Robert Frost

I see for Nature no defeat In one tree's overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow.

Robert Frost

For hard it is to keep from being King When it's in you and in the situation.

Robert Frost

For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery.

Robert Frost

There is much in nature against us. But we forget: Take nature altogether since time began, Including human nature, in peace and war, And it must be a little more in favor of man....

Robert Frost

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost

Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

Robert Blair

Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature.

Robert Benchley

If you look at eggs, you will see that each one is almost round but not quite ... Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls.

Thornton Wilder

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

Thomas Paine

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

Thomas Paine

Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'tis time to part.

Thomas Paine

Man must go back to nature for information.

Thomas Huxley

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.

Thomas Huxley

Man's Place in Nature.

Thomas Huxley

There is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity in Nature.

Thomas Huxley

The mathematician starts with a few propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practiced, is of the same general nature authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations are deductive.

Thomas Cole

Overall, rocks, wood and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its innermost depths.

Thomas Cole

Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nat, are unconscious of the harmony of creation.

Thomas Cole

. . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Thomas Browne

Rich with the spoils of nature.

Thomas Browne

There are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.

Thomas Browne

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other.