Famous Quotes & Sayings

Brian Jacques

Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.

Jane Jacobs

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

Jane Goodall

People say to me so often, 'Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,' and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.

Jane Goodall

There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.

Jane Goodall

For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.

James Whistler

Nature is usually wrong.

Juvenal

Never does nature say one thing and Wisdom another. Variant: Wisdom and Nature! are they not the same? Variant: Nature and Wisdon always speak alike.

Juvenal

Nature never says one thing, Wisdom another. [Lat., Nunquam aliud Natura aliud Sapientia dicit.]

I'm actually a very shy person. You'd be surprised how many leaders are shy. They're not all extroverts by nature.

Diane Ackerman

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Benjamin Franklin

The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.

Arthur Eddington

Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.

Arthur Eddington

Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

Arthur C. Clarke

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

Anton Chekhov

He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.

Anton Chekhov

Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.

Anton Chekhov

I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines.

Anton Chekhov

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Baltasar Gracian

Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art.

Anthony Trollope

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Diane Ackerman

Nature neither gives nor expects mercy.

Diane Ackerman

Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn't fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.

Desiderius Erasmus

Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human.

Bodhidharma

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don't practice nonsense.

Bodhidharma

If you see your nature, you don't need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?

Barry Humphries

Everyone had a Japanese maple, although after Pearl Harbor most of these were patriotically poisoned, ringbarked and extirpated.

Brooks Atkinson

Although birds coexist with us on this eroded planet, they live independently of us with a self-sufficiency that is almost a rebuke. In the world of birds a symposium on the purpose of life would be inconceivable. They do not need it. We are not that self-reliant. We are the ones who have lost our way.

Edward Young

Take God from nature, nothing great is left.

Edward Young

Man makes a death which Nature never made. And feels a thousand deaths in fearing one.

Edward Young

Nothing in Nature, much less conscious being, Was e'er created solely for itself.

Edward Young

Nature delights in progress; in advance.

Edward Young

Who lives to Nature, rarely can be poor ; who lives to fancy, never can be rich.