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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“Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature – and another woman to help him forget them.” -Helen Rowland
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“It is impossible to imagine a more complete fusion with nature than that of the Gypsy.” -Franz Liszt
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“Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature and the error is ineradicable.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.” -Al Gore
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“I think politicians get hamstrung by the nature of politics when the private sector can really do great things.” -Henry Rollins
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“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“Fear not, we are of the nature of the lion, and cannot descend to the destruction of mice and such small beasts.” -Elizabeth I
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“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” -E. M. Forster
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“Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.” -Frank Lloyd Wright
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“If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other’s nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.” -Havelock Ellis
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“Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.” -Alexander Pope
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“Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s.” -Desiderius Erasmus
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“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.” -Henry Beston
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“Our ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.” -Arthur Conan Doyle
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“The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.” -Helen Garner
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“If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.” -Kurt Vonnegut
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“‘Healing,’ Papa would tell me, ‘is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.’” -W. H. Auden
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“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.” -Garrison Keillor
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“All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.” -Marie Curie
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“It is the nature of babies to be in bliss.” -Deepak Chopra
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“Our founders got it right when they wrote in the Declaration of Independence that our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.” -Paul Ryan
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“I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.” -Richard Russo
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“Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.” -Galileo Galilei
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“And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro’ nature, moulding men.” -Alfred Lord Tennyson
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“Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.” -Henry Miller
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“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.” -Michel de Montaigne
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“I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.” -Miriam Makeba
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“Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.” -Marcel Proust
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“Man is by nature competitive, combative, ambitious, jealous, envious, and vengeful.” -Arthur Keith
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“You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.” -Horace
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“What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” -James Madison
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“It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.” -Henry A. Kissinger
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“It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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“The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.” -John Muir
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“The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.” -Francis Bacon
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“Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.” -Samuel Johnson
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“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” -Virginia Woolf
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“Men speak of natural rights, but I challenge any one to show where in nature any rights existed or were recognized until there was established for their declaration and protection a duly promulgated body of corresponding laws.” -Calvin Coolidge
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“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” -May Sarton
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“It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.” -Anatole France
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“I’m not into organized religion. I’m into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we’re all just part of nature.” -Neil Young
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“The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.” -John Ruskin
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“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.” -John Keats
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“There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.” -Stephen Hawking
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“He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.” -Harry Emerson Fosdick
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“I admire people who are, by nature, kind and fair to others.” -Sidney Sheldon
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“Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.” -Stephen King
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“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” -Max Planck
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“Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.” -Fran Lebowitz
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“Only the brave know how to forgive… a coward never forgave it is not in his nature.” -Laurence Sterne
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“In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.” -Richard M. Nixon
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“We need a government, alas, because of the nature of humans.” -P. J. O’Rourke
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“The world is too much with us late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.” -William Wordsworth
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“In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.” -George Eliot
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“Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.” -Leo Tolstoy
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“Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
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“Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.” -Richard Dawkins
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“It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win.” -John Paul Jones
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“Marriage is nature’s way of keeping us from fighting with strangers.” -Alan King
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“Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.” -Benjamin Disraeli
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“I also became close to nature, and am now able to appreciate the beauty with which this world is endowed.” -James Dean
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“Race hate isn’t human nature race hate is the abandonment of human nature.” -Orson Welles
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“Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.” -Honore de Balzac
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“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.” -Karl Von Clausewitz
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“Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” -Samuel Butler
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“Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature.” -Charles Dickens
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“Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.” -Edmund Burke
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“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” -Blaise Pascal
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“Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.” -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.” -Aleister Crowley
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“The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.” -John Kenneth Galbraith
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“Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman’s quality.” -Pierre Corneille
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“Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best.” -Bernard Meltzer
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“You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing.” -Orison Swett Marden
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“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments there are consequences.” -Robert Green Ingersoll
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“What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!” -Charles Darwin
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“To insult someone we call him ‘bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult.” -Isaac Asimov
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“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.” -George MacDonald
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“Borrow trouble for yourself, if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbours.” -Rudyard Kipling
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“Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.” -Margaret Mead
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“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.” -Harry Crews
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“The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.” -Samuel Adams
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“A rude nature is worse than a brute nature by so much more as man is better than a beast: and those that are of civil natures and genteel dispositions are as much nearer to celestial creatures as those that are rude and cruel are to devils.” -Margaret Cavendish
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“It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.” -Vincent Van Gogh
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“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” -Alice Walker
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“Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” -Woody Allen
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“Nature never breaks her own laws.” -Leonardo da Vinci
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“What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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“The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.” -Phillips Brooks
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“A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.” -Hubert H. Humphrey
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“I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.” -Neil Armstrong
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“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Lec
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“In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.” -Alan Watts
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“The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.” -Sigmund Freud
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“Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.” -E. O. Wilson
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“As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer.” -Victor Hugo
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“Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” -Ambrose Bierce
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“In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” -Alexander Hamilton
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“Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.” -Niccolo Machiavelli
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“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” -Saint Augustine
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“It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.” -Karl Marx
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“But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.” -Thomas Paine
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“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.” -Niels Bohr
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“Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.” -Jose Ortega y Gasset
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“It’s our nature: Human beings like success but they hate successful people.” -Carrot Top
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“An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.” -Washington Irving
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“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” -Henry Ward Beecher
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“We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.” -William James
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“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” -Aldous Huxley
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“We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature has placed in our power… the battle, sir, is not to the strong alone it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.” -Patrick Henry
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“There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.” -Clint Eastwood
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“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” -Soren Kierkegaard
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“In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.” -Marcus Aurelius
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“I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
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“Nature has always had more force than education.” -Voltaire
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“It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.” -Epictetus
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“I find it strange the way human nature wants heroes and yet wants to destroy their heroes. It’s a kind of mass insecurity people want something to look up to and get a buzz off but, at the same time, want to destroy it because it makes them feel insecure.” -Danielle Dax
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“If you look deep enough you will see music the heart of nature being everywhere music.” -Thomas Carlyle
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“The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.” -Erich Fromm
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“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.” -Walt Whitman
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“Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.” -Plato
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“It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.” -Edgar Allan Poe
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“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” -William Blake
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“Man seeks to change the foods available in nature to suit his tastes, thereby putting an end to the very essence of life contained in them.” -Sai Baba
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“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” -John D. Rockefeller
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“Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.” -Salvador Dali
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“Just what future the Designer of the universe has provided for the souls of men I do not know, I cannot prove. But I find that the whole order of Nature confirms my confidence that, if it is not like our noblest hopes and dreams, it will transcend them.” -Henry Norris Russell
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“Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.” -Napoleon Hill
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“Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.” -Warren Buffett
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“But when women are moved and lend help, when women, who are by nature calm and controlled, give encouragement and applause, when virtuous and knowledgeable women grace the endeavor with their sweet love, then it is invincible.” -Jose Marti
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“Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.” -Albert Camus
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“There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.” -Henry David Thoreau
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“External nature is only internal nature writ large.” -Swami Vivekananda
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“Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open…
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“Nature gives you the face you have at twenty it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.” -Coco Chanel
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“I was trying to do too many things at the same time, which is my nature. But I was enjoying it, and I still do enjoy it.” -Jimi Hendrix
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“The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.” -Aristotle
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“It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.” -Lao Tzu
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“Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
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“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” -Joseph Campbell
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“You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.” -Joel Osteen
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“Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.” -William Shakespeare
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“Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.” -Mahatma Gandhi
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“In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.” -Benjamin Franklin
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“Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
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“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.” -Benjamin Britten
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“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.” -John Adams
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“I’m concentrating on staying healthy, having peace, being happy, remembering what is important, taking in nature and animals, spending time reading, trying to understand the universe, where science and the spiritual meet.” -Joan Jett
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“It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.” -Albert Einstein
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“God and Nature first made us what we are, and then out of our own created genius we make ourselves what we want to be. Follow always that great law. Let the sky and God be our limit and Eternity our measurement.” -Marcus Garvey
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“Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.” -Marilyn Monroe
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“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.” -Anne Frank
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“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” -C. S. Lewis
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“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” -Helen Keller
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“My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.” -Hamlin Garland
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“There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.” -Robert Wilson Lynd
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“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt – it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.” -Hal Boyle
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“The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.” -Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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“Bats drink on the wing, like swallows, by sipping the surface, as they play over pools and streams.” -Gilbert White
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“When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” -James Whitcomb Riley
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“The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.” -Eric Berne
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“We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.” -Clarence Day
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“I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” -Joyce Kilmer
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“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” -P. D. James
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“Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it’s like that, then I want out.” -Steven Weinberg
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“People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature’s memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.” -Henry Cantwell Wallace
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“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” -Ingrid Bergman
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“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.” -Mother Teresa
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