Nature Quotes — page 3

Unhappy birds! what does it boot To build below the grass’s root, When lowness is unsafe as height, And chance o’ertakes, what ’scapeth spite?

he understood, as it were by the Harmony of the Heavens, that the Gravity of the Planets towards the Sun (according to whose measures the Planets move) were reciprocally as the Squares of their Distances from the Sun.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Winter is gone, and spring is over. The cuckoo-flowers grow mauver and mauver

My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.

For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; …

Behold the kings of the Earth how they oppress Thy chosen, to what highth thir pow'r unjust They have exalted, and behind them cast All fear of thee, arise and vindicate Thy Glory, free thy people from thir yoke

Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

But pleasures are like poppies spread— You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river— A moment white—then melts forever.

There is a bird who by his coat, And by the hoarseness of his note, Might be supposed a crow.

Children should not be suffer'd to lose the consideration of human nature in the shufflings of outward conditions.

...to be able to say of a representation that it is "exactly like Nature " is by no means equivalent to saying that it is a fine picture.

To make an end of all things on Earth, and our Planetical System of the World, he (God) need but put out the Sun

What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.

He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who ever stood up to him.

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny; You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by …

With me, the very quality of being cosmically sensitive breeds an exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the immediate—Old Providence, the woods and hills, the ancient ways and thoughts of New England

Shakespeare, in a play, brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea by some 100 miles.

If the Kirk confines human nature too strictly, it will break out in secret ways, for men and women are born into a terrestrial world, though they have hopes of Heaven.

Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them.

The course of Nature is the art of God.

Rich Cloaths, nor Cost, nor Education can Change Nature, nor transform and Ape into a Man.

So, there lies the brave de Kalb. The generous stranger, who came from a distant land to fight our battles and to water with his blood the tree of liberty. Would to God he had lived to share its fruits!