Great Throughts Treasury

"Any development of knowledge of the rules of nature which may help to give greater command of the powers of nature holds the hope of improving the living conditions of mankind; but also holds dangers which put our entire civilization to a serious test. The responsibilities, however, that these dangers are defeated in the right way, rests not only upon the scientist but must be shared by all circles of every nation." -

"If there be any man who is not enlightened by this sublime magnificence of created things, he is blind. If there be any man who is not aroused by the clamor of nature, he is deaf. If there be any one who, seeing all these works of God, does not praise him, he is dumb; if there be any one who, from so many signs, cannot perceive the First Principle, that man is foolish." - Saint Bonaventure, born John of Fidanza Bonaventure

"To live by the code of “do as you please regardless” is to become a prisoner of your own moral corruption. It is to be troubled by guilt and tormented by the inconsistency of living contrary to the demands of your own conscience and moral nature. You simply cannot be satisfied while ignoring any part of your nature." - Joe Boot

"The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty and symmetry little by little, as it gradually comes to be more unfolded." -

"The more we can squeeze out of nature by invention and discoveries and improved organization of labour, the more uncertain our existence seems to be. It's not we who lord it over things, it seems, but thinks which lord it over us." -

"Nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they both being servants of His Providence. Art is the perfection of Nature... Nature is the Art of God." -

"[Last Words] It is the nature of all things that take form to dissolve again. Strive with your whole being to attain perfection." -

"The crisis is an expedient of nature, like a fever, and the fanaticisms are signs that there still exist for men things they prize more than life and property." - Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt

"That great Law of Nature, Self-Preservation." - Samuel Butler

"The will, being inseparable from the nature of man, is not annihilated; but it is fettered by depraved and inordinate desires, so that it cannot aspire after anything that is good." -

"One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon, instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today." -

"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – acquired significant power to alter nature of his world." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"What is wrong with our culture is that it often offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition with and in opposition to nature. We thereby fail to realize that if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature diverse seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do by common experience thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness." - Lydia Maria Child

"The glory of human nature lies in our seeming capacity to exercise conscious control of our own destiny." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill

"In nothing is the uniformity of human nature more conspicuous than in its respect for virtue." -

"To live according to nature is the highest good; that is, to lead a life regulated by conscience and conformed to virtue and temperance." -

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting." -

"When I reflect on the nature of the soul, it seems to me by far more difficult and obscure to determine its character while it is in the body, a strange domicile, than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, and has arrived in the empyreal regions, in its own and proper home." -

"So long as we see the universe in the relation of use to ourselves, it remains cold, indifferent, meaningless to us; but when we see it in relation to God, sharing the life which is God, but sharing it even more imperfectly than ourselves, then the process of nature is no longer a meaningless intimidating mechanism, but pathetic and forgivable to us even as we are to ourselves." - Arthur Clutton-Brock

"Man strives for reconciliation with God – could he aspire to anything higher? Since identity with God is a paradoxical notion, reconciliation with Him remains man’s only goal because it represents no less than his redemption from the conflicting forces within his own nature." - Hermann Cohen

"Love is a desire of the whole being to be united to some thing, or some being, felt necessary to its completeness, by the most perfect means that nature permits, and reason dictates." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Nature is the term in which we comprehend all things that are representable in the forms of Time and Space." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The moral goodness of man, the necessary consequence of his constitution, is capable of indefinite perfection like all his other faculties, and nature has linked together in an unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue." - Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat

"Human beings, as one spin-off of the irrepressibly creative workings of nature, should not be regarded as religiously ultimate themselves but rather as evidencing, along with other forms of emergent life, the ultimacy of an all-encompassing nature." - Donald Allen Crosby

"Everything in nature is in continual motion… but it will be asked , from whence did she receive her motion? Our reply is, from herself, since she is the great whole, out of which consequently, nothing can exist." - Baron d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, born Paul Heinrich Dietrich

"The problems we face today – violent conflicts, destruction of nature, poverty, hunger, and so on – are mainly problems created by humans. They can be resolved – but only through human effort, understanding and the development of a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood. To do this, we need to cultivate a universal responsibility for one another and for the planet we share, based on a good heart and awareness." -

"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

"The more we know of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin

"Only man is capable of separating himself alike from God and from nature, and making himself his last end and living a purely self-regarding and irreligious existence." - Christopher Henry Dawson

"Racism is a way of thinking that has dogmatized the notion that one ethnic group is condemned by the laws of nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is marked off as hereditarily superior." - Joseph F. Doherty

"Lowering consumption need not deprive people of goods and services that really matter. To the contrary, life’ most meaningful and pleasant activities are often paragons of environmental virtue. The preponderance of things that people name as their most rewarding pastimes are infinitely sustainable. Religious practice, conversation, family and community gatherings, theater, music, dance, literature, sports, poetry, artistic and creative pursuits, education, and appreciation of nature all fit readily into a culture of permanence – a way of life that can endure through countless generations." - Alan Thein Durning

"A child is a man in a small letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve, or the Apple... He is Nature’s fresh picture newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred notebook. He is purely happy because he knows no evil." - John Earle, Bishop of Salisbury

"Materialism assumes a line of `continuity’ running through the whole scheme of nature, despite its obvious gaps; on the contrary, he underlines the significance of `discontinuity’ as positive evidence of the intervention of a higher source of influence which escapes man’s limited `scale of observation.’ A giant or a microbe would, with similar intelligence, observe the same phenomenon differently; they might be guided by their scales of observation to different, or at least, to modified conclusions. There is no scientific truth in an absolute sense. The phrase Ad veritatem per scientiam is an absurdity." - L. Francis Edmunds

"The chromosome reproduces itself exactly and exactly once, building itself up from materials around it, mostly proteins. Nothing similar has been known to occur outside living matter, though regarded chemically, the DNA molecule is not fundamentally different from any other large molecule. Clearly then, some other principle prevails in living nature… Consider the DNA molecule… the main constituent of the chromosomes, with its 10,000 links, in which four different types occur in various arrangements… and assuming 32 links of the chain contain 8 of each type we get for the odds of a particular arrangement 1:1017 That is, one to a hundred thousand billion… the inevitable conclusion sis that whatever evolution may depend on, it certainly does not depend on chance." - L. Francis Edmunds

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are." - Gretel Ehrlich

"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. 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. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." - Albert Einstein

"God who creates and is nature, is very difficult to understand, but He is not arbitrary or malicious." - Albert Einstein

"I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence - as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." - Albert Einstein

"Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions… The propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy." - Jacques Ellul

"The soul, mindful of its ethereal nature, presses upward with exceedingly great force, and struggles with its weight. It distrusts things seen… It seeks those things which truly and everlastingly are." - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam

"God, the Ground of Being, the Spirit Creator of all being, creates because he is love. Therefore he creates finite persons who are spirits, but have being, that they might learn to love. To learn to love man needs genuine self-being, genuine freedom; therefore man is put in an indirect relation to God within a pedagogical process where he can go his own partial, rebellious and faithless way until he discover, through fear and frustration, indeed through all the opposite experiences from Love, that God’s way, the way of love, is alone in accordance with man’s deepest nature and alone can satisfy his deepest needs." - Nels F. S. Ferré, fully Nels Fredrick Solomon Ferré

"It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law." - Ludwig Feuerbach, fully Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach

"We have no definition of God; we have only a roadway that leads out toward God. We are convinced beyond peradventure that he who travels merely the path of electrons, atoms, molecules toward a vision of the ultimate misses it, and that he who travels the road of spiritual values – goodness, truth, beauty – finds it. The eternal and creative Power cannot be adequately approached through the metrical world alone; the innermost nature of the ultimate is revealed also in the personal world of spiritual values." -

"The most powerful thing you can do to change the world is to change your own beliefs about the nature of life, people and reality to something more positive… and begin to act accordingly." - Shakti Gawain

"Whatever else religion does, it relates a view of the ultimate nature of reality to a set of ideas of how man is well advised... to live." - Clifford Geertz

"That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man." - Henry George

"The world is only a partial manifestation of the Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead, it is not that Divinity. The Godhead is infinitely greater than any natural manifestation can be. By his very infinity, by his absolute freedom, he exists beyond all possibility of integral formulation in any scheme of worlds or extension of cosmic Nature, however wide, complex, endlessly varied this and every world may seem to us." - Sri Aurobindo, born Aurobindo Ghose or Ghose

"[Nature] is whole and yet never finished." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe