Great Throughts Treasury

"In the book of nature, where every emotional, mental and spiritual quality of humanity may find its correspondence and illustrations, flowers represent good affections. As the flower precedes the fruit, and gives notice of its coming, so good thoughts, affections and intentions precede and give promise of deeds in love to others." - Homer Everett

"The universal of an atom containing emptiness and existence. This means that the atom has no intrinsic nature, so it is empty; yet its illusory characteristics are evident, so it is existent. Indeed, because illusory form has no essence, it must be no different from emptiness, and real emptiness contains qualities permeating to the surface of existence. Seeing that form is empty produces great wisdom and not dwelling in birth-and-death; seeing that emptiness is form produces great compassion and not dwelling in nirvana. When form and emptiness are nondual, compassion and wisdom are not different; only this is true seeing." - Fazang, also Fa-Tsang or Fāzàng NULL

"All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself." -

"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 the soil with strong mixture of troubles." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"Nature does not proceed by leaps." -

"It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"It is part of human nature to think wise things and do ridiculous ones." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"We live too much in books and not enough in nature, and we are very much like the simpleton of a Pliny the Younger, who went on studying a Greek author while before his eyes Vesuvius was overwhelming five cities beneath the ashes." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."" - Benjamin Franklin

"Slavery is an atrocious debasement of human nature." - Benjamin Franklin

"Rest is a state of peace between man and nature... Work is a symbol of conflict and discord; rest is an expression of dignity, peace and freedom." -

"The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man." -

"All nature's structuring and patterning must be based on triangles." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Society cannot continue to live on oil and gas. Those fossil fuels represent nature’s savings accounts which took billions of years to form." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"To ask for overt renunciation of a cherished doctrine is to expect too much of human nature. Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogma to which they have sworn their loyalty. Instead they rationalize, revise, and reinterpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is the purest orthodoxy." - J. William Galbraith

"Monotony is the law or nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupations is exhilarating and life-giving." -

"Negative thinking is depriving people of their natural birthright of health. It is the prime cause in shortening the lives of so many of us. And yet it is so simple to live a healthier, longer and so much happier life. We have only to recognize how God works His wonders through laws governing nature and "human nature."" - Walter M. Germain

"Whenever I contemplate man in the actual world or the ideal, I am lost amidst the infinite multiformity of his life, but always end in wonder at this essential unity of his nature." - Henry Giles

"We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth." - Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

"Justice is but the distributing to everything according to the requirements of its nature." - Joseph Glanvill

"The language of nature is the universal language." -

"As students of nature we are pantheists, as poets polytheists, as moral beings monotheists." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Imagination is nature's equal, sensuality her slave." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature is the living, visible garment of God." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature reacts not only to physical disease, but also to moral weakness; when the danger increases, she gives us greater courage." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Happiness consists in activity. Such is the constitution of our nature. It is a running stream, and not a stagnant pool." - John Mason Good

"Nothing whatever can be said in support of the assumption that nature will usually follow the simpler theory... The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth." - Nelson Goodman, fully Henry Nelson Goodman

"Love is the normal state of being, the state that puts you into entire harmony with all the laws of God and Nature, gives wings to your thoughts, inspiration to your efforts, and success to your enterprises." -

"It is one of the many paradoxes of psychology that the pursuit of happiness defeats its own purpose. We find happiness only when we do not directly seek it. An analogy will make this clear. In listening to music at a concert, we experience pleasurable feelings only so long as our attention is directed towards the music. But if in order to increase our happiness we give all our attention to our subjective feeling of happiness, it vanishes. Nature contrives to make it impossible for anyone to attain happiness by turning into himself." - James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield

"Heaven is attracting to itself whatever is congenial to its nature, is enriching itself by the spoils of earth, and collecting within its capacious bosom whatever is pure, permanent and divine." -

"Religion is the final centre of repose; the goal to which all things tend; apart form which man is a shadow, his very existence a riddle, and the stupendous scenes of nature which surround him as unmeaning as the leaves which the sibyl scattered in the wind." -

"Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, flowers, water and love. Of course, if the spectator be without the last, the whole will present but a pitiful appearance; and, in that case, the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, the trees are good for fuel, the flowers are classified by stamens, and the water is simply wet." - Heinrich Heine

"The grave is a sacred workshop of nature! a chamber for the figure of the body; death and life dwell here together as man and wife. They are one body, they are in union; God has joined them together, and what God hath joined together let no man put asunder." - Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger

"Such is the nature of men that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned, yet they will hardly believe they may be many so wise as themselves." - Thomas Hobbes

"The nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what He is, but only that He is; and therefore the attributes we give Him are not to tell one another what He is, nor to signify our opinion of His nature, but our desire to honor Him with such names as we conceive most honorable amongst ourselves." - Thomas Hobbes

"Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law, a creature’s perfection. All other graces, all divine dispensations contribute to this, and are lost in it as in a heaven. It expels the dross of our nature; it overcomes sorrow; it is the full joy of our Lord." - Richard Hooker

"Of the systems above us, angelic and seraphic, we know little; but we see one law, simple, efficient, and comprehensive as that of gravitation - the law of love, extending its sway over the whole of God’s dominions, living where He lives, embracing every moral movement in its ;universal authority, and producing the same harmony, where it is obeyed as we observe in the movements of nature." -

"Imagination is the organ through which the soul within us recognizes a soul without us; the spiritual eye by which the mind perceives and converses with the spiritualities of nature under her material forms; which tends to exalt eve the senses into soul by discerning a soul in the objects of sense." - Henry Norman Hudson

"The more a man follows nature, and is obedient to her laws, the longer he will live; the farther he deviates from these, the shorter will be his existence." - Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland

"Nature is the face of God. He appears to us through it, and we can read his thoughts in it." - Victor Hugo

"When you stop thinking that things have a past or future, and that they come or go, then in the whole universe there won't be a single atom that is not your own treasure. All you have to do is look into your own mind; then the marvelous reality will manifest itself at all times. Don't search for the truth with your intellect. Don't search at all. The nature of the mind is intrinsically pure." - Ta-chu Hui-Hai

"Language is by its very nature a communal thing, that is , it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody." -

"It is a truly sublime spectacle when in the stillness of the night, in an unclouded sky, the stars, like the world’s choir, rise and set, and as it were divide existence into two portions - the one, belonging to the earthly, is silent in the perfect stillness of night; whilst the other alone comes forth in sublimity, pomp, and majesty. Viewed in this light, the starry heavens truly exercise a moral influence over us; and who can readily stray into the paths of immorality if he has been accustomed to live amidst such thoughts and feelings, and frequently to dwell upon them? How are we entranced by the simple splendors of this wonderful drama of nature!" -

"Man reconciles himself to almost any event, however trying, if it happens in the ordinary course of nature. It is the extraordinary alone that he rebels against. There is a moral idea associated with this feeling; for the extraordinary appears to be something like an injustice of heaven." -