Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Dawkins

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Tryon Edwards

Nature hath nothing made so base, but can read some instruction to the wisest man.

Reinhold Messner

I was in continual agony; I have never in my life been so tired as on the summit of Everest that day. I just sat and sat there, oblivious to everything....

William Wordsworth

"One impulse from a vernal wood

Richard Louv

Increasingly the evidence suggests that people benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.

Richard Louv

Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.

Richard Louv

Numerous studies document the benefits to students from school grounds that are ecologically diverse and include free play areas, habitats for wildlife, walking trails, and gardens.

Richard Louv

The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.

Richard Francis Burton

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.

Albert Schweitzer

The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Patrick Renn

He was facing a great number of years, regardless. But I think this does show some compassion on the part of the jury.

Richard Davidson

I committed to doing everything I could to put compassion on the scientific map.

Richard Curtis

Bob Geldof feels the big picture all the time, even in the smallest argument when someone's saying, 'Well, no, you've got to have three staples in the program, not just two,' Bob feels people dying somewhere.

Richard Rohr

The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both.

William Hogarth

I had rather, if cruelty has been prevented by the four prints [The Four Stages of Cruelty], be maker of them than of the [Raphael] cartoons.

William Blum

Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.

Tracee Ellis Ross

I like to choose compassion over judgment and curiosity over fear.

Saul Alinsky

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

William J. Brennan

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

Ujjwal Nikam

I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society.

Samuel Johnson

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

W. E. B. Du Bois

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

William Ralph Inge

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.

Rick Riordan

Hades raised an eyebrow. When he sat forward in his throne, shadowy faces appeared in the folds of his black robes, faces of torment,as if the garment was stitched of trapped souls from the Fields of Punishment, trying to get out. The ADHD part of me wondered, off-task, whether the rest of his clothes were made the same way. What horrible things would you have to do in your life to get woven into Hades' underwear?

Samuel Johnson

It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence that all precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but by our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards that shall be obtained in another state.

Salvatore J. Cordileone

In places where marriage's core meaning has been altered through legal action, officials are beginning to target for punishment those believers and churches that refuse to adapt.

William Hazlitt

The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.