Best 6303 quotes in «nature quotes» category

We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

We don't usually start out with a plot that we can pitch in two lines. We spend a year brainstorming and discussing ideas that are sometimes of a visual nature, sometimes just about characters and then we try to structure the story.

Weeds are out most successful cultivated crop.

We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!

We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own.

We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources ... But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted.

We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth, i think man has gone too far.

We have lost sight of the dependence we have on nature in economics

We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.

We hide from ourselves by being with others.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

We have simply arrived too late in the history of the universe to see this primordial simplicity easily... But although the symmetries are hidden from us, we can sense that they are latent in nature, governing everything about us. That's the most exciting idea I know: that nature is much simpler than it looks. Nothing makes me more hopeful that our generation of human beings may actually hold the key to the universe in our hands - that perhaps in our lifetimes we may be able to tell why all of what we see in this immense universe of galaxies and particles is logically inevitable.

We inter-breath with the rain forests, we drink from the oceans. They are part of our own body.

We just lay on our bellies in the snow, gasping and immobile.

We humans think we are smart, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce noble, symmetrical flowers, and a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well-proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the monarch butterfly and the magnolia tree. The feeling of respect for all species will help us recognize the noblest nature in ourselves.

We know more from nature than we can at will communicate.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.

Weight is caused by one element being situated in another; and it moves by the shortest line towards its centre, not by its own choice, not because the centre draws it to itself, but because the other intervening element cannot withstand it.

We know great Nature's pow'r, Mother of things, whose vast unbounded sway From the deep centre all around extends Wide to the flaming barriers of the world. We feel her power; we strive not to repress (Vainly repress'd, or to deformity) Her lawful growth: ours be the task alone To check her rude excrescencies, to prune Her wanton overgrowth, and where she strays In uncouth shapes, to lead her gently back, With prudent hand, to form and better use.

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be contemplated from two sides, it can be divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.

We listen too much to the telephone and too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing.

Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.

We may... have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth... The developmental process described in this essay has been a process of evolution from primitive beginnings-a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature. But nothing that has been or will be said makes it a process of evolution toward anything.

We make the world we live in and shape our own environment.

We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.

We must always take from nature what we paint and always choose the most beautiful things.

... 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.

We might do well to stay home a few days and walk over the fields, or to stand in the shelter of the barn door and reflect upon the relentless and yet benevolent forces of Mother Nature. The laws of nature are relentless. They can never be disobeyed without exacting a penalty. Yet they are benevolent, for when they are understood and obeyed, nature yields up the abundance that blesses those who understand and obey.

We must develop a better sense of responsibilty towards our total environment

We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

We must keep our freedom of mind, ... and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

We must now understand that our own well-being can be achieved only through the well-being of the entire natural world around us.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.

We need the tonic of wildness.

We need silence to be able to touch souls.

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

We ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household belongings, which when worn with use we throw away.

We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.

We're the only creature God ever created that doesn't want to adapt. We want to make it stand still. And one thing that's constant is nature is constantly changing.

We need to preserve these sacred locations for ourselves, for the species of plants and animals that coexist in harmony there, and for the future generations of humankind that will need to be refreshed, renewed and healed by them.