Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

When the first light dawned on the earth, and the birds awoke, and the brave river was heard rippling confidently seaward, and the nimble early rising wind rustled the oak leaves about our tent, all people, having reinforced their bodies and their souls with sleep, and cast aside doubt and fear, were invited to unattempted adventures.

Jerome K. Jerome

Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible.

James Cagney

Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

We must go and see for ourselves.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

Gary Snyder

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board

Gary Snyder

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Gary Snyder

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gaston Bachelard

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

Horace

If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back.

Horace

Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet she hurries back, And will burst through your foolish contempt, triumphant.

Horace

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque revenit. You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will nevertheless come back.

Horace

Nature is harmony in discord.

Hannah Arendt

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Gottfried Leibniz

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

Gottfried Leibniz

In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.

Giambattista Vico

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

James Bryce

The national park is the best idea America ever had.

Isaac Asimov

There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural.

Immanuel Kant

Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.

Immanuel Kant

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Immanuel Kant

It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

Immanuel Kant

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

Immanuel Kant

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

Immanuel Kant

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

Jeremy Clarkson

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant's foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet's ability to self-heal.

Gretel Ehrlich

There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

Gretel Ehrlich

June marked the end of spring on California's central coast and the beginning of five months of dormancy that often erupted in fire. Mustard's yellow robes had long since turned red, then brown. Fog and sun mixed to create haze. The land had rusted. The mountains, once blue-hued with young oaks and blooming ceanosis, were tan and gray. I walked across the fallen blossoms of five yucca plants: only the bare poles of their stems remained to mark where their lights had shone the way.

Gretel Ehrlich

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

Gil Scott-Heron

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

Harriet Martineau

But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?