Famous Quotes & Sayings

Leo Tolstoy

Man by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life.

Louis Aragon

We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

Louis D. Brandeis

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.

Lord Byron

As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.

Lord Byron

I love not man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Kelvin

Questions of personal priority, however interesting they may be to the persons concerned, sink into insignificance in the prospect of any gain of deeper insight into the secrets of nature.

Loren Eiseley

Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone.

Loren Eiseley

Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

Loren Eiseley

As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?

Loren Eiseley

It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.

Loren Eiseley

Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.

Malcolm Forbes

I hope a start at getting some oil out of the enormous Alaska field isn't indefinitely mired in a bureaucratic morass as a result of our national concern for the ecology. This concern must not be so misguided, misdirected, misused that it serves to stop economic growth, to bankrupt companies, to stifle new development, new jobs, new horizons. In fighting new pollution and stemming present pollution, exciting, sometimes costly means and methods exist and others will evolve. But blanket legislative naysaying to expanding power and energy sources is stupid, self-defeating.

Malcolm Forbes

Will this massive outcry [about pollution] continue long enough to have effective results? Will federal and state laws be enacted with effective enforcement clauses? Will people be concerned long enough to pay the bill through higher prices? Will towns tole lost jobs when it proves too costly to clean obsolete plants?... I think so, but it sure won't be as easy as the present outcry and political oratory suggest. The answers to preserving a livable environment are not all simple, and some of the nuts now pushing simplistic cure-alls won't help bring about any lasting solutions.

Maimonides

It should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of anything else.

Mahatma Gandhi

Human nature will find itself only when it fully realizes that to be human it has to cease to be beastly or brutal.

Mahatma Gandhi

The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum-total of that life is God.

Mahatma Gandhi

Forces of nature act in a mysterious manner. We can but solve the mystery by deducing the unknown result from the known results of similar events.

Mahatma Gandhi

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.

Hamlin Garland

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

Hamlin Garland

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.

Hamlin Garland

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

Gustave Flaubert

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Spring never is spring unless it comes too soon.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.

John Dryden

By viewing nature, nature's handmaid art, Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow: Thus fishes first to shipping did impart, Their tail the rudder, and their head the prow.

John Dryden

The glorious lamp of heaven, the radiant sun, Is Nature's eye.

John Dryden

Chaucer followed Nature everywhere, but was never so bold to go beyond her.

John Dryden

Nature meant for me a wife, a silly harmless household Dove, fond without art; and kind without deceit.

John Dryden

Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd; The next, in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go; To make a third, she join'd the former two.

John Lubbock

Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in the woods one of the trees were to speak to me.

John Locke

There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

Elisha Gray

Some may claim that is it unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as "miracles." But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things ... subservient to the rule of law.