Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.

Henry David Thoreau

Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.

Henry David Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant. . .

Henry David Thoreau

The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.

Henry David Thoreau

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

Henry David Thoreau

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.

Henry David Thoreau

I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon. There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.

Henry David Thoreau

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

Henry David Thoreau

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Henry David Thoreau

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Henry David Thoreau

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Henry David Thoreau

The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.

Henry David Thoreau

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Nature wants children to be children before men... Childhood has its own seeing, thinking and feeling.

James Bryce

The national park is the best idea America ever had.

Isaac Asimov

There seems to be a feeling that anything that is natural is good. Strychnine is natural.

Immanuel Kant

Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.

Immanuel Kant

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Immanuel Kant

It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

Immanuel Kant

Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.

Immanuel Kant

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

Immanuel Kant

Human reason is by nature architectonic.

Francisco Goya

But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details.

Francis Thompson

Thou cannot stir a flower Without troubling a star.

Herbert Read

Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.

Evan Esar

The quizzical expression of the monkey at the zoo comes from his wondering whether he is his brother's keeper, or his keeper's brother.