Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leonardo da Vinci

A single and distinct luminous body causes stronger relief in the objects than a diffused light; as may be seen by comparing one side of a landscape illuminated by the sun, and one overshadowed by clouds, and illuminated only by the diffused light of the atmosphere.

Leonardo da Vinci

Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It counsels and corrects all the arts of mankind... it is the prince of mathematics, and the sciences founded on it are absolutely certain. It has measured the distances and sizes of the stars it has discovered the elements and their location... it has given birth to architecture and to perspective and to the divine art of painting.

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.

Paul Cezanne

The Louvre is a good book to consult, but it must only be an intermediary. The real and immense study that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.

Paul Cezanne

In order to make progress, there is only nature, and the eye is turned through contact with her.

Ivan Turgenev

Tempered, gradual animation, the methodical restrain of sensations and energies, the equilibrium of sickness and health in each creature--this is nature's essence, its immutable law, this is what it's based on and what it adheres to.

Ivan Turgenev

However much you knock at nature's door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

Ivan Turgenev

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.

Ivan Turgenev

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

Ivan Turgenev

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel

Iris Murdoch

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Igor Stravinsky

It's one of nature's way that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.

Hyman Rickover

It troubles me that we are so easily pressured by purveyors of technology into permitting so-called "progress" to alter our lives without attempting to control it-as if technology were an irrepressible force of nature to which we must meekly submit.

Gloria Steinem

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

Giordano Bruno

Nature is none other than God in all things.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

Nancy Mitford

Irish gardens beat all for horror. With 19 gardeners, Lord Talbot of Malahide has produced an affair exactly like a suburban golf course.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens.