Great Throughts Treasury

"Despite what man can do to man--and nature's plan--there are those civilizations out there in the cosmos who believe that Planet Earth is worth helping in its time of great adjustments." - Tauri NULL

"Every creation is subject to recurrence. Every thing you meet had a previous existence: whatever you have lost will come again. Every thing comes a second time: all things return to a settled position when they have gone away, all things begin when they have ceased to be. They are brought to an end in order that they may come into being: nothing is lost except that it may be recovered. All this revolving order of things, therefore, is evidence of the resurrection of the dead. God ordained it in works before He commanded it in writing, He proclaimed it by strength before he proclaimed it in words. He first sent you nature as teacher, intending to send you prophecy also, in order that having learnt from nature, you may the more easily believe prophecy." - Tertullian, fully Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian NULL

"Do you know the first law of human nature? Self-propagation." - James Thurber and Elliott Nugent

"Forms become more necessary as the government becomes more active and powerful, and private persons become more indolent and feeble. By their nature, democratic nations stand more in need of forms than other nations, and respect them less." - Alexis de Tocqueville, fully Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville

"We are here because embedded in our human nature is the secret code for heaven’s self-realization. Heaven is certainly omnipresent, may even be omniscient, but is most likely not omnipotent. It needs our active participation to realize its own truth... Since we help heaven to realize itself through our self-discovery, and self-understanding in day-to-day living, the ultimate meaning of life is found in our ordinary, human existence." - Tu Weiming

"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." -

"Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them." -

"Intoxicated with the power to manipulate nature, some misguided men have produced a rationale to replace the Myth of Superabundance. It might be called the Myth of Scientific Supremacy, for it rests on the rationalization that the scientists can fix everything tomorrow." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"Today the conservation movement finds itself turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it... In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indian knew from the beginning; that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"Where nature is concerned, familiarity breeds love and knowledge, not contempt." - Stewart Udall, Fully Stewart Lee Udall

"Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

"It is untrue that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality; its sovereign law is subordination and dependence." -

"The idea of bringing all men on an equality with each other has always been a pleasant dream; the law cannot equalize men in spite of nature." -

"There are no contradictions in nature." -

"The most sublime labor of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... in the world's childhood, men were by nature sublime poets." - Giovanni Battista Pergolesi

"Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and vigorous training to accomplish that end." - Jacob Viner

"The choice and nature of our holidays is more perhaps than anything in our lives an expression of ourselves." - Alec Waugh, formally Alexander Raban Waugh

"That the truths of the Bible have the power of awakening an intense moral feeling in every human being; that they make bad men good, and send a pulse of healthful feeling through all the domestic, civil, and social relations; that they teach men to love right, and hate wrong, and seek each other's welfare as children of a common parent; that they control the baleful passions of the heart, and thus make men proficient in self-government; and finally that they teach man to aspire after conformity to a being of infinite holiness, and fill him with hopes more purifying, exalted, and suited to his nature than any other book the world has ever known - these are facts as incontrovertible as the laws of philosophy, or the demonstrations of mathematics." - Francis Wayland

"Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature. Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race." - Peter Weiss, fully Peter Ulrich Weiss

"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Viewing health as something to achieve gives rise to effort and striving, which create stress. And this can interfere with the natural healing tendencies already present within us. The meditative traditions see things differently; they regard health as intrinsic to our nature, and thus already fully present within us... Dis-ease results from a loss of connection with our intrinsic health, caused by ignorance, distraction or confusion." - John Welwood

"The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase." - E. B. White, fully Elwyn Brooks White

"Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt... We shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man." - Lynn White, Jr., fully Lynn Townsend White, Jr.

"Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Truth should be the first lesson of the child and the last aspiration of manhood; for it has been well said that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature." - John Greenleaf Whittier

"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success." -

"It is that faculty by which we discover and enjoy the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime in literature, art, and nature; which recognizes a noble thought, as a virtuous mind welcome a pure sentiment by an involuntary glow of satisfaction. While the principle of perception is inherent in the soul, it requires a certain amount of knowledge to draw out and direct it." - Robert Aris Willmott

"Perhaps there is no property in which men are more distinguished from each other, than in the various degrees in which they possess the faculty of observation. The great herd of mankind pass their lives in listless inattention and indifference as to what is going on around them, being perfectly content to satisfy the mere cravings of nature, while those who are destined to distinction have lynx-eyed vigilance that nothing can escape." - William Wirt

"Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher." - William Wordsworth

"Nature did not betray the heart that loved her." - William Wordsworth

"The wisest, happiest of our kind are they that ever walk content with Nature's way." - William Wordsworth

"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

"One ought to love society, if he wishes to enjoy solitude. It is a social nature that solitude works upon with the most various power. If one is misanthropic, and betakes himself to loneliness that he may get away from hateful things, solitude is a silent emptiness to him." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"When people feel separated, they try to make things work by concentrating only on their own willpower and trying to control everything. When you remember to align yourself with your own nature and your life purpose, you naturally are in touch with your natural power. When you align yourself with even a single value, like compassion, trust, self-respect, or following through on synchronicities – life becomes more meaningful, often more fun, more hopeful, and you feel resourceful." - Carol Adrienne

"There runs throughout Nature unmistakable evidence of thought, corresponding to the mental operations of our own mind, and therefore intelligible to us as thinking beings, and unaccountable on any other basis than that they owe their existence to the working of intelligence; and no theory that overlooks this element can be true to nature." - Louis Agassiz, fully Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

"Essence beyond essence, Nature increate, Framer of the world, I set thee, Lord, before my face. I lift up my soul to thee, I worship thee on my knees, and humble myself under thy mighty hand." -

"Everything naturally loves itself, the result being that everything naturally keeps itself in being, and resists corruption as far as it can. Wherefore suicide is contrary to the inclination of nature, and to charity whereby every man should love himself." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"Human law has the true nature of law only in so far as it corresponds to the right reason, and therefore is derived from the eternal law. In so far as it falls short of right reason, a law is said to be a wicked law; and so, lacking the true nature of law, it is rather a kind of violence." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis

"Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity." -

"Nature is the nature of all things that are; things that are have a union with all things from the beginning." -

"Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life." -

"The divine Nature, free and perfect and blissful, must be manifested in the individual in order that it may manifest in the world." -

"The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with the first vague questioning of nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and her." -

"Error, falsehood, evil are cosmic powers, but relative in their nature, not absolute, since they depend for existence upon the perversion or contradiction of their opposites, and are not like truth and good, self-existing absolutes, inherent aspects of the Supreme Self-Existent." -

"What then does propter hoc add to post hoc? At the factual level, nothing at all, so long as the conjunction is constant in either case... In nature one thing just happens after another. Cause and effect have their place only in our imaginative arrangements and extensions of these primary facts." - A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer

"A belief that we were created by God for a purpose does not then provide us with the kind of adequate account of life’s meaning we might expect. Religions are not clear about what this purpose is. The idea that it is to serve God seems deeply implausible and contrary to most conceptions of God’s nature." - Julian Baggini

"Faith is by its nature non-rational. Having faith does not in any way remove responsibility for one’s own ethical and existential decisions. Faith is about `opting out’ of the need for rational justification rather than a deliberate attempt to act contrary to reason." - Julian Baggini

"Pain in the human world is the birth of personality, its fight for its own nature." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

"The dignity of man and the dignity of faith require the recognition of freedom to choose the truth, and freedom in the truth. Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom and not goodness." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev

"There exists in that Eternal World the permanent realities of every thing, which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature." - William Blake