nature
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘nature’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“The essence of the Hebrew Bible, transmitted by Christianity, is separation: between life and death, nature and God, good and evil, man and woman, and the holy and the profane.” -Dennis Prager
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“There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.” -William Henry Harrison
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“Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.” -Yoko Ono
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“The creative destruction that social media is currently unleashing will change more than technology or the leader board of the Fortune 100. It is driving a qualitative shift in the nature of relationships between brands and their customers.” -Simon Mainwaring
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“To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.” -James Whistler
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“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.” -Octavio Paz
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“There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.” -Richard Le Gallienne
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“The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.” -Paracelsus
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“The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.” -Walter Lippmann
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“I’m so not stylish by nature, but I’ve learned to work with what I have.” -Julie Bowen
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“Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.” -Denis Diderot
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“The man who interprets Nature is always held in great honor.” -Zora Neale Hurston
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“When I was growing up, Dr. Seuss was really my favorite. There was something about the lyrical nature and the simplicity of his work that really hit me.” -Tim Burton
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“I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer’s body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.” -Martha Graham
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“He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature… is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.” -Henri Frederic Amiel
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“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.” -Empedocles
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“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.” -Maria Mitchell
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“Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?” -Daisaku Ikeda
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“I think it’s a very firm part of human nature that if you surround yourself with like-minded people, you’ll end up thinking more extreme versions of what you thought before.” -Cass Sunstein
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“Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy.” -Dorothy Thompson
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“Nature can do more than physicians.” -Oliver Cromwell
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“To me, the world’s rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.” -David Hockney
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“Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.” -Lord Acton
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“None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath.” -Marian Anderson
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“A hatred of failure has always been part of my nature.” -Paul Getty
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“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” -Marshall McLuhan
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“God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“Human Nature is the only science of man and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.” -David Hume
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“I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.” -Herbert Read
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“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.” -Hermann Hesse
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“That’s the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.” -Miguel de Cervantes
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“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.” -William Burroughs
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“Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.” -Jacob Bronowski
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“Man is the miracle in nature. God Is the One Miracle to man.” -Jean Ingelow
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“As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.” -Albrecht Durer
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“Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.” -Hosea Ballou
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“I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.” -Robert Fulghum
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“For all of nature’s wonder and beauty, it is also hostile and unpredictable.” -Liam Neeson
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“Loki in ‘Thor’ is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I’d built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.” -Tom Hiddleston
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“I know I’m not known as method. By nature I’m not a brooder. What I continue to use is a mixture of the English school, which is traditionally outside-in, and the more American way of working from the inside out.” -Hugh Jackman
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“Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.” -Henry Adams
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“Nature is at work. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.” -David Seabury
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“Marriage is an institution fits in perfect harmony with the laws of nature whereas systems of slavery and segregation were designed to brutally oppress people and thereby violated the laws of nature.” -Jack Kingston
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“No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.” -William Howard Taft
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“If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.” -Satish Kumar
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“Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.” -Archibald Alexander
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“Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.” -Edward Thorndike
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“It’s not in our nature. Americans have never been a people that drive through a nice neighborhood and say, ‘Oh, I hate the people who live in these nice houses.’” -Marco Rubio
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“We all need to look into the dark side of our nature – that’s where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we’re busy denying.” -Sue Grafton
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“Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense.” -William Lyon Phelps
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“There is a great deal of human nature in man.” -Charles Kingsley
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“While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use, he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula, until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course.” -Larry Bird
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“Nature’s great masterpiece, an elephant the only harmless great thing.” -John Donne
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“Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.” -Marquis de Sade
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“I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.” -Charles Baudelaire
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“Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.” -Pope Paul VI
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“Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer.” -Bryant H. McGill
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“We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.” -Anthony Hopkins
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“Parents of recovered children, and I’ve met hundreds, all share the same experience of doubters and deniers telling us our child must have never even had autism or that the recovery was simply nature’s course. We all know better, and frankly we’re too busy helping other parents to really care.” -Jenny McCarthy
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“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office.” -Newt Gingrich
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“Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It’s the nature of the process.” -Martin Scorsese
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“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” -Wendell Berry
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“We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none.” -Christian Nestell Bovee
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“The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man’s moral nature.” -Thorstein Veblen
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“Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.” -Zhuangzi
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“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.” -Eleonora Duse
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“People must help one another it is nature’s law.” -Jean de La Fontaine
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“Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.” -Alphonse de Lamartine
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“The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.” -Alan Kay
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“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.” -Emily Bronte
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“I thoroughly enjoy getting away from the game and going out fishing because it’s so relaxing, so quiet and peaceful. I mean, there’s no noise other than nature – and it’s so different from what I do in a tournament situation that it just eases my mind.” -Tiger Woods
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“There’s something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting.” -Greg Kinnear
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“No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.” -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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“I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” -Claude Monet
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“Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for a defense, and for a defense only! It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.” -Adam Smith
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“It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.” -Max Beerbohm
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“But I’m a hot-blooded Italian by nature. Whatever the situation you present, I’m going to make something out of it.” -Maynard James Keenan
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“It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.” -Elvis Presley
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“We must return to nature and nature’s god.” -Luther Burbank
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“Ayurveda is a sister philosophy to yoga. It is the science of life or longevity and it teaches about the power and the cycles of nature, as well as the elements.” -Christy Turlington
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“If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.” -John B. S. Haldane
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“If a person is homosexual by nature – that is, if one’s sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one’s identity as gender or skin color – then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.” -Jon…
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“Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.” -Will Durant
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“Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.” -Andrew Bernstein
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“Italians know about human nature – they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it.” -Donna Leon
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“A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.” -Umberto Eco
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“Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” -Richard P. Feynman
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“Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.” -Michael J. Fox
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“Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.” -William Cowper
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“Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley
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“We are learning, too, that the love of beauty is one of Nature’s greatest healers.” -Ellsworth Huntington
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“America is still mostly xenophobic and racist. That’s the nature of America, I think.” -Jerry Garcia
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“Married love between man and woman is bigger than oaths guarded by right of nature.” -Aeschylus
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“Another thing I like to do is sit back and take in nature. To look at the birds, listen to their singing, go hiking, camping and jogging and running, walking along the beach, playing games and sometimes being alone with the great outdoors. It’s very special to me.” -Larry Wilcox
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“When I’m off the road, my husband and I recharge our batteries. It’s a day of deep rest and connection with the spiritual, and that can be anything – going for a walk in nature, being in silence, burning incense.” -Alanis Morissette
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“Everyone who understands the nature of God rightly necessarily knows that God is to be believed and hoped in, that he is to be loved and called upon, and to be heard in all things.” -William Ames
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“As in nature, as in art, so in grace it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.” -Thomas Guthrie
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“The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people – that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.” -James Thurber
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“I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.” -Paul Cezanne
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“I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature and that man will be myself.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters… and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.” -Jacques Yves Cousteau
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“Support by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man.” -Nikita Khrushchev
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“It is not to be expected that human nature will change in a day.” -Frank B. Kellogg
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“The elusive nature of love… it can be such a fleeting thing. You see it there and it’s just fluttering and it’s gone.” -Mick Jagger
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“In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.” -Taylor Swift
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“Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!” -Oliver Goldsmith
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“The duty of man is the same in respect to his own nature as in respect to the nature of all other things, namely not to follow it but to amend it.” -John Stuart Mill
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“Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.” -Fay Weldon
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“I’m experimental by nature… always exploring my creativity.” -Christina Aguilera
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“It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious he learned the habit from Nature.” -Christopher Morley
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“The willow is my favorite tree. I grew up near one. It’s the most flexible tree in nature and nothing can break it – no wind, no elements, it can bend and withstand anything.” -Pink
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“Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.” -Lady Gaga
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“There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.” -Edward Hopper
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“Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.” -Doug Coupland
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“There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” -George Byron
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“Where there are large powers with little ambition… nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.” -Jonathan Swift
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“I’m aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.” -Isabel Allende
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“There’s an easygoing nature that comes with a perspective of things that aren’t as important as we make them sometimes.” -Marguerite Moreau
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“Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.” -Lord Chesterfield
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“Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.” -John Dewey
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“Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator.” -Antonio Gaudi
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“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if the simplest things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.” -Eleanora Duse
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“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.” -Tennessee Williams
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“It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.” -Jimmy Carter
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“Man was nature’s mistake she neglected to finish him and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.” -Eric Hoffer
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“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“Look, when you’re the president, there’s all kinds of things said about us. I mean, it’s just the nature of the job.” -George W. Bush
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“All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.” -Frances Wright
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“Although I do wrong, I do not the wrongs that I am charged with doing the wrong that I do is through the frailty of human nature, like other men. No man lives without fault.” -Joseph Smith, Jr.
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“The more intense the nature of a man, the more readily will he find meditation, and the more successfully will he practice it.” -James Allen
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“I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.” -Desmond Tutu
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“Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.” -Lewis Thomas
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“Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.” -Standing Bear
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“Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.” -Ovid
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“If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.” -Alex Noble
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“Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best for that we must have recourse to art.” -Baltasar Gracian
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“Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.” -William Hazlitt
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“By nature all men are equal in liberty, but not in other endowments.” -Thomas Aquinas
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“Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.” -Franz Kafka
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“All is disgust when a man leaves his own nature and does what is unfit.” -Sophocles
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“Corruption is nature’s way of restoring our faith in democracy.” -Peter Ustinov
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“I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.” -Michelangelo
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“I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.” -Julius Caesar
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“But human nature dictates that there will always be cheaters. That’s inevitable. Where there’s money involved and glory, there are going to be people that cheat, and there will always be ways to cheat.” -David Millar
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“I’m very competitive by nature. And I like to be the underdog – It’s the best way to win. To come from behind and win is a great feeling!” -Zac Efron
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“Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away.” -Laurence J. Peter
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“My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.” -Lee Atwater
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“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.” -H. G. Wells
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“By nature’s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do not occur to him at all.” -George Santayana
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“The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.” -Joseph Addison
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“The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.” -Reinhold Niebuhr
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“Everything in excess is opposed to nature.” -Hippocrates
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“You don’t have to call it God or Jesus. That’s religious humbug to a lot of people, but you’ve gotta believe that nature and spiritual things surround us. That is what put us here! I thank the universe for that every day of my life.” -Jack LaLanne
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“What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer
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“I think that in today’s world, by nature, we are all self-centered. And that often leads to selfishness.” -Gary Chapman
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“As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.” -Arnold J. Toynbee
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“The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.” -Alfred Adler
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“Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.” -Jane Austen
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“There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.” -Ansel Adams
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“A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature’s part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.” -Thomas Huxley
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“Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.” -Mason Cooley
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