A freak of nature.
Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings? [ Keats ]
Nature admits no lie. [ Carlyle ]
Nature makes no leaps.
Of what I call God,
And fools call Nature. [ Robert Browning ]
Nature passes nurture. [ Proverb ]
Grace overcomes Nature.
Nature abhors a vacuum. [ Proverb ]
Nature means Necessity. [ Bailey ]
Beauty is Nature's brag. [ Milton ]
Nature's bank-dividends. [ Haliburton ]
Custom is another nature. [ Proverb ]
Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her. [ Wordsworth ]
Nature is the art of God. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Habit is ten times nature. [ Wellington ]
Nature alone is permanent. [ Longfellow ]
Nature must obey necessity. [ Julius Caesar ]
We are religious by nature. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]
Art is nature concentrated. [ Balzac ]
Thou unassuming commonplace
Of nature. [ Wordsworth ]
Flowers are nature's jewels. [ G. Croly ]
Nature does nothing in vain.
Thought is invisible nature. [ Heine ]
God and Nature met in light. [ Tennyson ]
Human nature craves novelty. [ Pliny ]
Nature is a revelation of God. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
For Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God. [ Owen Meredith ]
Nature is God's Old Testament. [ Theodore Parker ]
Habit is stronger than nature. [ Quintus Curtius Rufus ]
Nature is beyond all teaching. [ Proverb ]
Nature always speaks of spirit. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
There is no solitude in nature. [ Schiller ]
Nature tells every secret once. [ Emerson ]
The counterfeit and counterpart
Of Nature reproduced in art. [ Longfellow ]
The natural alone is permanent. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Human nature is fond of novelty. [ Pliny the Elder ]
The finer impulse of our nature. [ Schiller ]
And binding nature fast in fate.
Left free the human will. [ Pope ]
Endless is the riddle of Nature. [ Körner ]
Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Nothing in nature is unbeautiful. [ Tennyson ]
Nature never writes a blind hand. [ T. Starr King ]
Nature trips us up when we strut. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Amiable weakness of human nature. [ Gibbon ]
Nature draws more than ten teams. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The poetry of earth is never dead. [ Keats ]
Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness. [ Emerson ]
Nature alone knows what she means. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
As the husband is, the wife is:
Thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature
Will have weight to drag thee down. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Passing through Nature to eternity. [ William Shakespeare ]
The living, visible garment of God. [ Goethe ]
Nature has inclined us to love men. [ Cicero ]
Education is only second to nature. [ Horace Bushnell ]
Nature is always wise in every part. [ Lord Thurlow ]
Art may err, but nature cannot miss. [ Dryden ]
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go.
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show. [ Emerson ]
Nature and love cannot be concealed. [ German Proverb ]
Nature is the immense shadow of man. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Let dogs delight to bark and bite.
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight.
For 'tis their nature to. [ Isaac Watts ]
Eloquence is the language of Nature. [ Colton ]
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose. [ William Shakespeare ]
Love can be founded upon Nature only. [ Shenstone ]
A father is a banker given by nature.
He whom nature thus bereaves,
Is ever fancy's favourite child;
For thee enchanted dreams she weaves
Of changeful beauty, bright and wild. [ Mrs. Osgood ]
We by art unteach what Nature taught. [ Dryden ]
Art helps Nature, and Experience Art. [ Proverb ]
A happy genius is the gift of nature. [ Dryden ]
Nature never gives everything at once. [ Johnson ]
Joyousness is Nature's garb of health. [ Lamartine ]
Extremes in nature equal good produce,
Extremes in man concur to general use. [ Pope ]
Nature and wisdom always say the same. [ Juvenal ]
Nature and wisdom never are at strife. [ Juvenal ]
Nature knows best, and she says, roar! [ Maria Edgeworth ]
Nature's tears are Reason's merriment. [ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ]
Habit is, as it were, a second nature. [ Cicero ]
Every one must pay his debt to Nature. [ German Proverb ]
Thy plain and open nature sees mankind
But in appearance, not what they are. [ Froude ]
Nature, the vicar of the Almighty Lord. [ Chaucer ]
The amen! of nature is always a flower. [ Holmes ]
Nature is not an Aggregate but a Whole. [ Carlyle ]
The softest blush that nature spreads
Gave color to her cheek:
Such orient color smiles through heaven
When vernal mornings break. [ Mallet ]
Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Joy is the mainspring in the whole
Of endless Nature's calm rotation.
Joy moves the dazzling wheels that roll
In the great Time-piece of Creation. [ Schiller ]
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous form of things:
We murder to dissect. [ Wordsworth ]
Practice in time becomes second nature. [ Anon ]
Nature has made man's breast no windows
To publish what he does within doors,
Nor what dark secrets there inhabit,
Unless his own rash folly blab it. [ Butler ]
Nature designed us to be of good cheer. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
Honest men are the gentlemen of nature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
O, if so much beauty doth reveal
Itself in every vein of life and nature.
How beautiful must be the Source itself,
The Ever Bright One. [ Tegner ]
Self-preservation is nature's first law. [ Proverb ]
Nature hath made nothing so base but can
Read some instruction to the wisest man. [ Aleyn ]
Necessity is stronger than human nature. [ Dionysius ]
I am as free as nature first made man.
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran. [ Dryden ]
Nature makes fools; women make coxcombs.
A peace is of the nature of a conquest;
For then both parties nobly are subdued.
And neither party loser. [ William Shakespeare ]
Where can I grasp thee, infinite Nature? [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Every form as nature made it is correct. [ Propertius ]
Looks through nature up to nature's God. [ Pope ]
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find.
That it excels all other bliss
That God or Nature hath assign'd,
Though much I want that most would have.
Yet still my mind forbids to crave. [ Wm. Byrd ]
Allow not nature more than nature needs. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature is frugal, and her wants are few. [ Young ]
A brother is a friend provided by nature. [ Legouvé père ]
Nature needs little; opinion exacts much.
Habit is the deepest law of human nature. [ Carlyle ]
All women seem by nature to be coquettes. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Happiness is a good that Nature sells us. [ Voltaire ]
A sturdy oak, which nature forms
To brave a hundred winter's storms.
While round its head the whirlwinds blow.
Remains with root infix'd below:
When fell'd to earth, a ship it sails
Through dashing waves and driving gales
And now at sea, again defies
The threatening clouds and howling skies. [ Hoole ]
The wisest, happiest of our kind are they
That ever walk content with Nature's way. [ Wordsworth ]
All the operations of Nature are gradual. [ Bacon ]
Read nature; nature is a friend to truth;
Nature is Christian, preaches to mankind;
And bids dead matter aid us in our creed. [ Young ]
Alas! the slippery nature of tender youth. [ Claudianus ]
Nature gives liberty even to dumb animals. [ Tacitus ]
The nature of bad news affects the teller. [ William Shakespeare ]
Now sunk the sun; the closing hour of day,
Came onward, mantled over with sober grey;
Nature in silence bid the world repose. [ Parnell ]
The rising winds
And falling springs,
Birds, beasts, all things
Adore him in their kinds.
Thus all is hurled
In sacred hymns and order, the great chime
And symphony of nature. [ Henry Vaughan ]
Equal nature fashion'd us
All in one mould.
All's but the outward gloss
And politic form that does distinguish us. [ Massinger ]
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul. [ Pope ]
Murder itself is past all expiation,
The greatest crime that nature doth abhor. [ Goffe ]
No blank, no trifle, Nature made or meant. [ Young ]
Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine! [ Milton ]
O majestic night! nature's great ancestor! [ Young ]
Two principles in human nature reign--
Self-love to urge, and reason to restrain. [ Pope ]
Resistance to oppression is second nature. [ Seneca ]
Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of Nature
Shake my fell purpose. [ William Shakespeare, Macbeth ]
Good-nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive divine. [ Pope ]
Nature's loving proxy, the watchful mother. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Labour for labour's sake is against nature. [ Locke ]
There is but one book for genius, - nature. [ Madame Deluzy ]
Earth, that's Nature's mother, is her tomb. [ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ]
Nature in women is so nearly allied to art. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. [ Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham ]
What nature wants, commodious gold bestows;
'Tis thus we cut the bread another sows. [ Pope ]
Tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep! [ Young ]
The laws of nature are the thoughts of God. [ Zschokke ]
Man makes a death, which nature never made. [ Young ]
Nature never made us for play and pleasure. [ Proverb ]
Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman. [ Holmes ]
Old Age, a second child, by nature curst
With more and greater evils than the first.
Weak, sickly, full of pains: in every breath
Railing at life, and yet afraid of death. [ Churchill ]
The foxglove, with its stately bells,
Of purple, shall adorn thy dells;
The wallflower, on each rifted rock,
From liberal blossoms shall breathe down,
(Gold blossoms frecked with iron-brown,)
Its fragrance; while the hollyhock,
The pink, and the carnation vie
With lupin and with lavender.
To decorate the fading year;
And larkspurs, many-hued, shall drive
Gloom from the groves, where red leaves lie.
And Nature seems but half alive. [ D. M. Moir ]
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. [ Bryant ]
Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
But looks through Nature up to Nature's God. [ Pope ]
To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
These should be hours for necessities.
Not for delights; times to repair our nature
With comforting repose, and not for us
To waste these times. [ William Shakespeare ]
The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains - Beautiful!
I linger yet with nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learned the language of another world. [ Byron ]
Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies,
And catch the manners living as they rise. [ Pope ]
Destiny is our will, and our will is nature. [ Disraeli ]
'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white
Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature made every fop to plague his brother,
Just as one beauty mortifies another. [ Pope ]
Nature ever provides for her own exigencies. [ Seneca ]
Good nature without prudence is foolishness. [ Proverb ]
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends. [ William Shakespeare ]
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw. [ Pope ]
Mark what unvaried laws preserve each state.
Laws wise as Nature, and as fixed as Fate. [ Pope ]
Action, so to speak, is the genius of nature. [ Blair ]
Yes - the same sin that overthrew the angels,
And of all sins most easily besets
Mortals the nearest to the angelic nature:
The vile are only vain; the great are proud. [ Byron ]
Sweet nurse of nature, over the senses creep. [ Churchill ]
Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires. [ Gray ]
The stars shall fade away, the Sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amid the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. [ Joseph Addison ]
Beauty is Nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss. [ Milton ]
Nature is the living, visible garment of God. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The man who consecrates his hours
By vigorous effort, and an honest aim.
At once he draws the sting of life and death;
He walks with nature; and her paths are peace. [ Young ]
Nature has no moods; they belong to man alone. [ Auerbach ]
No tears dim the sweet look that Nature wears. [ Longfellow ]
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre over a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! and darkness, how profound!
Nor eye, nor listening ear, an object finds;
Creation sleeps. 'Tis as the general pulse
Of life stood still, and nature made a pause;
An awful pause! prophetic of her end. [ Young ]
For use almost can change the stamp of nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature is a volume of which God is the author. [ Harvey ]
It is pride, and not nature, that craves much. [ Proverb ]
The learned is happy nature to explore,
The fool is happy that he knows no more;
The rich is happy in the plenty given.
The poor contents him with the care of Heaven. [ Pope ]
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin. [ William Shakespeare ]
Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topt hills, a humbler heaven. [ Pope ]
And now from Nature up to Nature's God,
But down from Natures God look Nature through. [ Robert Montgomery ]
Oh! Nature's noblest gift - my graygoose quill! [ Byron ]
All Nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance direction, which thou canst not see. [ Pope ]
Nature counts nothing that she meets with base,
But lives and loves in every place. [ Alfred Tennyson ]
Tears are nature's lotion for the eyes
The eyes see better for being washed with them. [ Bovee ]
He that follows Nature is never out of his way. [ Proverb ]
Dew-drops, Nature's tears, which she
Sheds in her own breast for the fair which die.
The sun insists on gladness; but at night,
When he is gone, poor Nature loves to weep. [ Bailey ]
The immortal mind, superior to his fate.
Amid the outrage of external things,
Firm as the solid base of this great world.
Rests on his own foundation. Blow, ye winds!
Ye waves! ye thunders! roll your tempests on!
Shake, ye old pillars of the marble sky!
Till at its orbs and all its worlds of fire
Be loosen'd from their seats; yet still serene,
The unconquer'd mind looks down upon the wreck;
And ever stronger as the storms advance,
Firm through the closing ruin holds his way,
When nature calls him to the destined goal. [ Akenside ]
Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her work, gave sign of woe
That all was lost. [ Milton ]
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature, like man, sometimes weeps for gladness. [ Beaconsfield ]
'Tis good nature only wins the heart;
It moulds the body to an easy grace
And brightens every feature of the face;
It smoothes the unpolish'd tongue with eloquence
And adds persuasion to the finest sense. [ Stillingfleet ]
Nature is still the grand agent in making poets. [ Carlyle ]
Taste and good-nature are universally connected. [ Shenstone ]
Nature draws with greater force than seven oxen. [ German Proverb ]
Wrinkles disfigure a woman less than ill nature. [ Dupuy ]
Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals. [ Tacitus ]
The earth, that is nature's mother, is her tomb. [ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ]
Mighty Nature bounds as from her birth,
The sun is in the heavens, and life on earth;
Flowers in the valley, splendor in the beam,
Health on the gale, and freshness in the stream. [ Byron ]
Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nature makes merit, and fortune puts it to work. [ Rochefoucauld ]
So work the honey-bees;
Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home.
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-ey'd justice, with his surly hum.
Delivering over to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. [ William Shakespeare ]
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. [ Emerson ]
Oh! nature's noblest gift - my grey goosed quill:
Slave of my thoughts, obedient to my will,
Torn from thy parent bird to form a pen,
That mighty instrument of little men! [ Byron ]
Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine.
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine
For me kind nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower. [ Pope ]
Do not, for ever, with thy veiled lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust;
Thou knowst 'tis common; all that lives must die.
Passing through nature to eternity. [ William Shakespeare ]
Scripture, like Nature, lays down no definitions. [ Spinoza ]
Different good, by art or nature given,
To different nations, makes their blessings even. [ Goldsmith ]
When wrapt in fire, the realms of ether glow,
And Heaven's last thunder shakes the world below,
Thou, undismayed, shalt o'er the ruins smile,
And light thy torch at Nature's funeral pile. [ Thomas Campbell ]
Fate wings, with every wish, the afflictive dart.
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art. [ Johnson ]
Solitude is the voice of Nature that speaks to us. [ George Sand ]
Oh! liberty, thou goddess, heavenly bright.
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight!
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign.
And smiling plenty, leads thy wanton train;
Eased of her load, subjection grows more light
And poverty looks cheerful in the sight;
Thou makest the gloomy face of nature gay,
Giv'st beauty to the sun, and pleasure to the day. [ Addison ]
Nature, through all her kingdoms, insures herself. [ Emerson ]
Good-nature and good sense are usually companions. [ Pope ]
Nature fits all her children with something to do. [ Lowell ]
Wolves may lose their teeth, but not their nature. [ Proverb ]
Love is omnipresent in nature as motive and reward. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Commonsense is nature's gift, but reason is an art. [ Beattie ]
This fellow must have a rare understanding;
For nature recompenseth the defects
Of one part with redundance in another;
Blind men have excellent memories, and the tongue
Thus indisposed, there's treasure in the intellect. [ Shirley ]
All argument will vanish before one touch of Nature. [ Colman ]
Stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God. [ Bible ]
Women are rakes by nature and prudes from necessity. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
There are more men ennobled by study than by nature. [ Cicero ]
Men do nothing excellent but by imitation of nature. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Greater and less don't change the nature of a thing.
Nature intended that woman should be her masterpiece. [ Lessing ]
To resist violence is implanted in the nature of man. [ Tacitus ]
One is never criminal in obeying the voice of Nature. [ Balzac ]
Nature is sometimes subdued, but seldom extinguished. [ Bacon ]
Supine facility and good nature are vastly different. [ Proverb ]
Nature and wisdom are not, but should be, companions. [ Smollett ]
Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men. [ Lowell ]
Education polishes good nature, and corrects bad ones. [ Proverb ]
Wrinkles and ill-nature together made a woman hideous. [ Chamfort ]
Clear and round dealing is the honour of man's nature. [ Proverb ]
Good nature is a great misfortune if it want prudence. [ Proverb ]
It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men. [ Sheridan ]
There is nothing directly moral in our nature but love. [ A. Comte ]
Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy. [ Aristotle ]
Every man's censure is first moulded in his own nature. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The whole of nature exists in the very smallest things. [ Quoted by Emerson ]
Simplicity is Nature's first step, and the last of art. [ P. J. Bailey ]
Crooked by nature is never made straight by education.. [ Proverb ]
Good nature is the proper soil upon which virtue grows. [ Proverb ]
Nature is but a name for an effect, whose cause is God. [ Cowper ]
Let our last sleep be in the graves of our native land! [ Osceola ]
What we call a gentleman is no longer the man of nature. [ Diderot ]
Studies perfect nature, and are perfected by experience. [ Bacon ]
Night is the benefit of nature, and made for man's rest. [ Livy ]
A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
God put in man thought; society, action; Nature, revery. [ Victor Hugo ]
Ill-nature is a sort of running sore of the disposition. [ Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings) ]
All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Love is a religion of which the great pontiff is Nature.
No fact in nature but carries the whole sense of nature. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of nature. [ Emerson ]
A promise against law or duty, is void in its own nature. [ Proverb ]
A gentleman's first characteristic is fineness of nature. [ John Ruskin ]
Fortune is but a synonymous word for nature and necessity. [ Bentley ]
Nature makes us vagabonds, the world makes us respectable. [ Alexander Smith ]
Sympathy with Nature is a part of the good man's religion. [ F. H. Hedge ]
Love is like medical science, the art of assisting nature. [ Dr. Lallemand ]
Nature's gentlemen are the worst type of gentlemen I know. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
The law of nature is the strictest expression of necessity. [ Moleschott ]
Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature. [ Voltaire ]
The robe which curious Nature weaves to hang upon the head. [ Decker ]
All that live must die, passing through nature to eternity. [ Shakespeare ]
He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature. [ Diderot ]
Flowers, leaves, fruit, are the airwoven children of light. [ Moleschott ]
Nature is the chart of God, mapping out all His attributes. [ Tupper ]
But what is woman? Only one of nature's agreeable blunders. [ Cowley ]
Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day. [ Theodore Parker ]
Nature works on the method of all for each and each for all. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nature forces on our heart a Creator; history, a Providence. [ Jean Paul ]
A nobleman who leads a degraded life is a monster in nature. [ Molière ]
To be rich be diligent; move on
Like heavens great movers that enrich the earth;
Whose moment's sloth would show the world undone;
And make the spring straight bury all her birth.
Rich are the diligent who can command Time - nature's stock. [ Davenant ]
Drive away what springs from nature; it returns at a gallop. [ P. N. Destouches ]
He is false by nature that has a black head and a red beard. [ Proverb ]
Nature has given man no better thing than shortness of life. [ Pliny the Elder ]
Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature. [ Bobby Knight ]
The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her. [ W. M. Hunt ]
Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. [ Emerson ]
The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature. [ Hare ]
All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature. [ Aristotle ]
Go forth under the open sky, and listen to nature's teaching. [ Bryant ]
Nature is the only book that teems with meaning on every page. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is the end of art to inoculate men with the love of nature. [ Beecher ]
Good-nature is one of the richest fruits of true Christianity. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Nowadays, those who love nature are accused of being romantic. [ Chamfort ]
It is the beautiful necessity of our nature to love something. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
Love without desire is a delusion: it does not exist in nature. [ Ninon de Lenclos ]
Guard thy heart on this weak side, where most our nature fails. [ Addison ]
Nature is the master of talent; genius is the master of nature. [ J. G. Holland ]
Nature holds an immense uncollected debt over every man's head. [ Ward Beecher ]
Expediency is a law of nature.
The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel. [ Beaconsfield ]
A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes. [ Pope ]
Nature teaches us to love our friends, but religion our enemies. [ Proverb ]
Divine nature gave the fields, man's invention built the cities. [ Varro ]
A passion for the dramatic art is inherent in the nature of man. [ Edwin Forrest ]
Come forth into the light of things; let nature be your teacher. [ Wordsworth ]
The nature of things will not be altered by our fancies of them. [ Proverb ]
No law can be finally sacred to me but the law of my own nature. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
How quickly nature falls to revolt when gold becomes her object! [ Shakespeare ]
A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man. [ Tacitus ]
Nature is not fixed, but fluid; spirit alters, moulds, makes it. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
It is the nature of man to err, of a fool to persevere in error.
Dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the life of Nature. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Nature is indeed adequate to Fear, but to Reverence not adequate. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Great men are the true men, the men in whom Nature has succeeded. [ Amiel ]
Nature has given us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself. [ Seneca ]
Music is a gift of the, Author of Nature to the whole human race. [ Hogarth ]
The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. [ Emerson ]
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nature does more than supply materials; she also supplies powers. [ J. S. Mill ]
So true it is, that nature has caprices which, art cannot imitate. [ Macaulay ]
Is the painter a plagiarist because he sets his palette to nature? [ Benjamin West ]
As prodigal of all dear grace as Nature was in making graces dear. [ Shakespeare ]
There is not so variable a thing in nature as a lady's head-dress. [ Addison ]
Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Character is what Nature has engraven on us; can we then efface it? [ Voltaire ]
By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse. [ Chalmers ]
Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth. [ Cicero ]
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth. [ Balzac ]
Nature has no promise for society, least of all, any remedy for sin. [ Horace Bushnell ]
Nature always leaps to the surface, and manages to show what she is. [ Boileau ]
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. [ Blaise Pascal ]
The two rarest things to be met with are good sense and good nature. [ William Hazlitt ]
You may turn nature out of doors with violence, but she will return. [ Horace ]
Nature takes as much pains in the forming of a beggar as an emperor. [ Proverb ]
Nature provides without stint the main requisites of human happiness. [ Sir John Lubbock ]
Love is a canvas furnished by Nature, and embroidered by imagination. [ Voltaire ]
The love of liberty is implanted by nature in the breasts of all men. [ Dionysius ]
No man ever thought too highly of his nature or too meanly of himself. [ Young ]
Generally nature hangs out a sign of simplicity in the face of a fool. [ Thomas Fuller ]
We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves. [ Colton ]
Youth and Will may resist excess, but Nature takes revenge in silence. [ A. de Musset ]
It is not in the nature of true greatness to be exclusive and arrogant. [ Beecher ]
Deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full of the milk of human kindness. [ William Shakespeare ]
Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly. [ Hazlitt ]
Nature is too thin a screen: the glory of the One breaks in everywhere. [ Emerson ]
Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature. [ Dryden ]
Nature gives parts and merit, but it is fortune that brings them forth. [ Proverb ]
Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well. [ Alexander Smith ]
No expression of politeness but has its root in the moral nature of man. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
To be happy, we must be true to nature, and carry our age along with us. [ Hazlitt ]
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature shrink away. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
O lady, nobility is thine, and thy form is the reflection of thy nature! [ Euripides ]
It is the greatest misfortune in nature for a woman to want a confidant. [ Farquhar ]
It is the nature of experience to come to us only when too late for use. [ Mme. de Rieux ]
The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate. [ Ouida ]
Character is moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. [ Emerson ]
Friendship is given us by nature, , not to favor vice, but to aid virtue. [ Cicero ]
It is the nature of intellect to strive to improve in intellectual power. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial. [ Froude ]
Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help itself. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Our belief or disbelief of a thing does not alter the nature of the thing. [ Tillotson ]
Whoever has not ascended mountains knows little of the beauties of Nature. [ William Hewitt ]
In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place. [ Bacon ]
Learn on how little man may live, and how small a portion nature requires. [ Lucan ]
Nature, study, and practice must combine to ensure proficiency in any art. [ Aristotle ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools. [ Colton ]
Alas! poor human nature, pity, if hard pressed, degenerates into contempt. [ J. G. Saxe ]
The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. [ Longfellow ]
And out of darkness came the hands That reach through nature, moulding men. [ Tennyson ]
It is the nature of the human disposition to hate him whom you have injured. [ Tacitus ]
Children will grow up substantially what they are by nature - and only that. [ Mrs. H. B. Stowe ]
The only way to please God is to follow the good inclinations of our nature. [ Alfred Mercier ]
Nature never hurries; atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
Grace is a light superior to Nature, which should direct and preside over it. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Envy lies between two beings equal in nature, though unequal in circumstances. [ Jeremy Collier ]
Often the cockloft is empty in those whom nature hath built many stories high. [ Thomas Fuller ]
Time destroys the speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature. [ Cicero ]
Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed: nature never pretends. [ Lavater ]
Where order in variety we see, and where, though all things differ, all agree. [ Pope ]
Fade, flowers, fade! Nature will have it so; 'tis but what we in our autumn do. [ Waller ]
Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit against one's good nature. [ Montesquieu ]
The world is a scene of changes, and to be constant in nature were inconstancy. [ Cowley ]
Him who lonely loves to seek the distant hills, and there converse with nature. [ Thomson ]
Beauty is the first present Nature gives to women, and the first it takes away. [ Mere ]
Men shiver when thou art named; nature appalled shakes off her wonted firmness. [ Blair ]
Not a ray is dimmed, not an atom worn; nature's oldest force is as good as new. [ Emerson ]
Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making. [ Addison ]
Nature was here so lavish of her store, That she bestowed until she had no more. [ Brown ]
There is no religion without mystery. God Himself is the great secret of nature. [ Chateaubriand ]
Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Nature takes as much pains in the womb for the forming of a beggar as an emperor. [ Proverb ]
A mother's tenderness and a father's care are nature's gifts for man's advantage. [ L. Murray ]
I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. [ Emerson ]
The dearest thing in nature is not comparable to the dearest thing of friendship. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
And when obedient nature knows his will, a fly, a grapestone, or a hair can kill. [ Prior ]
A woman would be in despair if nature had formed her as fashion makes her appear. [ Mlle. de Lespinasse ]
Nothing in nature, much less conscious being, was ever created solely for itself. [ Young ]
Beauty is the first gift Nature gives to woman, and the first she takes from her.
He is richest who is content with the least; for content is the wealth of nature. [ Socrates ]
Nature makes all the noblemen; wealth, education, or pedigree never made one yet. [ H. W. Shaw ]
Nature has granted to all to be happy, if we did but know how to use her benefits. [ Claudian ]
The world is content with words; few think of searching into the nature of things. [ Pascal ]
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, chief nourisher in life's feast. [ William Shakespeare ]
A blush is the sign which Nature hangs out to show where chastity and honor dwell. [ Gotthold ]
Nature repairs her ravages, - repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor. [ George Eliot ]
Nature does not make all great men, more than all other men, in the self-same mould. [ Carlyle ]
To be happy, there are certain sides of our nature that must be entirely stultified. [ Chamfort ]
Men naturally warm and heady are transported with the greatest flush of good-nature. [ Addison ]
Truth is born with us; and we must do violence to nature, to shake off our veracity. [ St. Evremond ]
In teaching patience and perseverance, also Nature teaches us a secret of happiness. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]
The science of Nature initiates the human mind into the secret thoughts of Divinity. [ Mme. d'Agoult ]
If every man works at that for which nature fitted him, the cows will be well tended. [ La Fontaine ]
Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver. [ Emerson ]
Nature, as It grows again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey, dull and heavy. [ William Shakespeare ]
It has been the providence of nature to give this creature nine lives Instead of one. [ Pilpay ]
A tardiness in Nature, which often leaves the history unspoke, that it intends to do. [ William Shakespeare ]
The lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere. [ Ward Beecher ]
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. [ John Sheffield ]
Laws of nature are God's thoughts thinking themselves out in the orbits and the tides. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said. Let Newton be; and all was light. [ Pope ]
The weaknesses of women have been given them by nature to exercise the virtues of men. [ Mme. Necker ]
Virtue, as understood by the world, is a constant struggle against the laws of nature. [ De Finod ]
Curiosity in children Nature has provided to remove the ignorance they were born with. [ Locke ]
In nature there's no blemish but the mind; none can be called deformed but the unkind. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature without discipline is of small force, and discipline without nature more feeble. [ John Lily ]
Trust not a woman when she weeps, for it is her nature to weep when she wants her will. [ Socrates ]
The change of seasons pleaseth nature, and the mutability of riches delighteth fortune. [ Boetius ]
Under whose feet (subjected to His grace). Sit nature, fortune, motion, time, and place. [ Tasso ]
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom. [ Montaigne ]
This is an art which does mend nature, - change it rather; but the art itself is nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of honesty and good-nature. [ Montaigne ]
The laws of nature never vary; in their application they never hesitate, nor are wanting. [ Draper ]
Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature. [ N. Hawthorne ]
The grandest operations, both in nature and grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. [ Cecil ]
A stern discipline pervades all Nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind. [ Spenser ]
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven. [ Lamartine ]
The astronomer thinks of the stars, the naturalist of nature, the philosopher of himself. [ Fontenelle ]
Dame Nature gave him comeliness and health; and Fortune, for a passport, gave him wealth. [ Walter Harte ]
True art is but the anti-type of nature, - the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility. [ James A. Garfield ]
Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction. [ Goethe ]
Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man; only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Nature has lent us tears - the cry of suffering when the man at last can bear it no longer. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can nature show as fair? [ Byron ]
Nature cannot but always act rightly, quite unconcerned as to what may be the consequences. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal. [ Froude ]
Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthily into nature. [ Emerson ]
Some friendships are made by nature, some by contract, some by interest, and some by souls. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination. [ Herbert Spencer ]
We're not ourselves when Nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature never sends a great man into the planet without confiding the secret to another soul. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
You cannot get anything out of Nature or from God by gambling; - only out of your neighbour. [ John Ruskin ]
Nothing really pleasant or unpleasant subsists by nature, but all things become so by habit. [ Epictetus ]
Philosophy writes treatises on old age and friendship; Nature makes those on youth and love. [ D'Alembert ]
All nature is a vast symbolism; every material fact has sheathed within it a spiritual truth. [ Chapin ]
The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature. [ Ruskin ]
Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, - pain and pleasure. [ Jeremy Bentham ]
Nature will sometimes lie buried a great while, and yet revive upon occasion of a temptation. [ Proverb ]
Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception, is really according to order. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words. [ J. G. Holland ]
Time is a blooming field: nature is ever teeming with life; and all is seed, and all is fruit. [ Schiller ]
Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies. [ Victor Hugo ]
Nature had made occupation a necessity; society makes it a duty; habit may make it a pleasure. [ Capelle ]
The blush is nature's alarm at the approach of sin, and her testimony to the dignity of virtue. [ Fuller ]
It is as difficult to condemn illicit loves by the laws of nature, as it is easy by human laws. [ Montaigne ]
Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupefy the mind. [ Coleridge ]
She is the most virtuous woman whom Nature has made the most voluptuous, and reason the coldest. [ La Beaumelle ]
Literature draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies. [ Lowell ]
Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men. [ Schiller ]
Good-sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. [ John Dryden ]
No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. [ Manilius ]
Genius ever stands with nature in solemn union, and what the one foretells the other will fulfil. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of Nature with which she indicates how much she loves us. [ Herve ]
In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eat about twice as much as nature requires. [ Franklin ]
Nature has planted passions in the heart of man for the wisest purposes both of religion and life. [ Fox ]
Every man acts truly so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties in himself. [ Sir T. Browne ]
Good-nature is the beauty of the mind, and, like personal beauty, wins almost without anything else. [ Hanway ]
Men live best upon small means. Nature has provided for all, if they only knew how to use her gifts. [ Claudianus ]
I have been reasoning all my life, and find that all argument will vanish before one touch of Nature. [ Colman ]
By accident, (i.e. not following from the nature of the thing, but from some accidental circumstance.
Nature and religion are the bands of friendship, excellence and usefulness are its great endearments. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions. [ Lowell ]
All nature mourns, the skies relent in showers; hushed are the birds, and closed the drooping flowers. [ Pope ]
Nothing is more idle than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach. [ Johnson ]
Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and duration. [ Carlyle ]
So work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom. [ William Shakespeare ]
The divine nature is perfection; and to be nearest to the divine nature is to be nearest to perfection. [ Xenophon ]
Nature is an Aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the reecho of higher strings within us. [ Novalis ]
Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face. [ Longfellow ]
To die, I own, is a dread passage - terrible to nature, chiefly to those who have, like me, been happy. [ Thomson ]
Time destroys the groundless conceits of man, but confirms that which is founded on nature and reality. [ Cicero ]
Woman is the most precious jewel taken from Nature's casket, for the ornamentation and happiness of man. [ Guyard ]
Nature never made an unkind creature; ill-usage and bad habits have deformed a fair and lovely creation. [ Sterne ]
I follow nature as the surest guide, and resign myself with implicit obedience to her sacred ordinances. [ Cicero ]
Nature and truth, though never so low or vulgar, are yet pleasing when openly and artlessly represented. [ Pope ]
To become an able man in any profession, there are three things necessary, - nature, study, and practice. [ Aristotle ]
There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government. [ Johnson ]
Mental sunshine makes the mind grow, and perpetual happiness makes human nature a flower garden in bloom. [ Christian D. Larson ]
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty, but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature. [ Joseph Addison ]
He who laughs too much hath the nature of a fool, he that laughs not at all hath the nature of an old cat. [ Proverb ]
Nature has said to woman: Be fair if thou canst, be virtuous if thou wilt; but, considerate, thou must be. [ Beaumarchais ]
Were wisdom to be sold, she would give no price; every man is satisfied with the share he has from nature. [ Henry Home ]
Any one may do a casual act of good-nature; but a continuation of them shows it a part of the temperament. [ Sterne ]
It is a brief period of life that is granted us by nature, but the memory of a well-spent life never dies. [ Cicero ]
Human nature is so constituted that all see and judge better in the affairs of other men than in their own. [ Terence ]
In experiencing the ills of nature, one despises death; in learning the evils of society, one despises life. [ Chamfort ]
Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty. [ Emerson ]
The grave - dread thing! - men shiver when thou art named; Nature, appalled, shakes off her wonted firmness. [ Blair ]
Nature works after such eternal, necessary, divine laws, that the Deity himself could alter nothing in them. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, after Spinoza ]
If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful. [ Thoreau ]
Nature tempts us continually, but we are not responsible for the sin, unless our reasoning gives its consent. [ Pascal ]
The friends of the present day are of the nature of melons; we must try fifty before we meet with a good one. [ Claude-Mermet ]
The jealous man's disease is of so malignant a nature that it converts all it takes into its own nourishment. [ Addison ]
See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. [ Carlyle ]
The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other. [ Epictetus ]
Such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. [ Swift ]
To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty's holiest touch of nature. [ Dickens ]
Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms - oftenest. God bless her! - in female breasts. [ Dickens ]
I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of. [ George Eliot ]
All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge; and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance. [ William Ellery Channing ]
Thou art not required to search into the nature of God, but into the nature of the beings which he has created. [ Rückert ]
A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other. [ Lord Bacon ]
Logic helps us to strip off the outward disguise of things, and to behold and judge of them in their own nature. [ I. Watts ]
The cold iron of neglect is sharper to a child's sensitive nature than any alteration of harshness and affection. [ Mrs. Annie Edwards ]
Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven. [ Lew Wallace ]
I have often thought that the nature of women was inferior to that of men in general, but superior in particular. [ Greville ]
Nature and Heaven command you, at your peril, to discern worth from unworth in everything, and most of all in man. [ John Ruskin ]
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance; it transcends speech; it is the bodily symbol of identity. [ Emerson ]
Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the tragedy of man. [ John Morley ]
Pride, though it cannot prevent the holy affections of nature from beings felt, may prevent them from being shown. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
That which we truly call honourable is praiseworthy in its own nature, even though it should be praised by no one. [ Cicero ]
Nature meant to make woman her masterpiece, but committed a mistake in the choice of the clay; she took it too fine. [ Lessing ]
When we view elevated ideas of Nature, the result of that view is admiration, which is always the cause of pleasure. [ Dryden ]
Applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable. [ Shenstone ]
His nature is too noble for the world; he would not flatter Neptune for his trident, or Jove for his power to thunder. [ William Shakespeare ]
Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. [ Emerson ]
Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought Beauty too rich to go forth upon the earth without a meet alloy. [ George MacDonald ]
If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us. [ Clarendon ]
All the thinking in the world does not bring us to thought; we must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigour to our moral nature. [ Ward Beecher ]
Genius in poverty is never feared, because Nature, though liberal in her gifts in one instance, is forgetful in another. [ B. R. Haydon ]
The history of persecution is a history of endeavor to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. [ Emerson ]
Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature. [ Shenstone ]
What is a philosopher? One who opposes nature to law, reason to usage, conscience to opinion, and his judgment to error. [ Chamfort ]
No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature but what he was forced to ascribe it to many inconsistencies. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Equality is not a law of nature. Nature has made no two things equal: its sovereign law is subordination and dependence. [ Vauvenargues ]
When Nature fills the sails, the vessel goes smoothly on; and when judgment is the pilot, the insurance need not be high. [ Sir T. Browne ]
Bad is by its very nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything, is by its very nature good. [ Carlyle ]
It is untrue that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality; its sovereign law is subordination and dependence. [ Vauvenargues ]
The nature of our constitution makes eloquence more useful and more necessary in this country than in any other in Europe. [ Chesterfield ]
The philosophy of princes is to dive into the secrets of men, leaving the secrets of nature to those that have spare time. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
As to be perfectly just is an attribute of the Divine nature, to be so to the utmost of our abilities is the glory of man. [ Addison ]
To be strong by nature, to be urged on by the native powers of the mind, and to be inspired by a divine spirit, as it were. [ Cicero ]
Men live best upon a little; Nature has given to all the privilege of being happy, if they but knew how to use their gifts. [ Claudianus ]
Nature without learning is like a blind man; learning without Nature, like a maimed one; practice without both, incomplete. [ Plutarch ]
No great truth is allowed by Nature to be demonstrable to any person who, foreseeing its consequences, desires to refuse it. [ John Ruskin ]
Pain is the deepest thing we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and holy than any other. [ Hallam ]
Nature, the handmaid of God Almighty, does nothing but with good advice, if we make research into the true reason of things. [ James Howell ]
For the bow cannot possibly stand always bent, nor can human nature or human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation. [ Cervantes ]
Happiness is only to be found in a recurrence to the principles of human nature; and these will prompt very simple measures. [ Beaconsfield ]
Cheerfulness is full of significance; it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature. [ Charles Kingsley ]
Nature always wears the colours of the spirit. To a man labouring under calamity the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer. [ Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman ]
Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man. [ Heine ]
There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick. [ Sheridan ]
Whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity. [ Bacon ]
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters. [ Emerson ]
God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature. [ William Shakespeare ]
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. [ William Shakespeare, Hamlet ]
Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it in poetry or painting must produce a much greater. [ Dryden ]
Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age. [ Carlyle ]
Freedom in a democracy is the glory of the state, and, therefore, in a democracy only will the freeman of nature deign to dwell. [ Plato ]
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons. [ Emerson ]
Of all the gifts that Nature can give us, the faculty of remaining silent, or of answering a propos, is perhaps the most useful. [ Mme. Campan ]
Dost thou think that there is little difference whether thou dost a thing from the heart, as nature suggests, or with a purpose? [ Terence ]
Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above the beasts, in this lower world. [ Dr. Watts ]
Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. There are simply a sun, flowers, water, and love. [ Heine ]
Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man. [ Chapin ]
The highest genius never flowers in satire, but culminates in sympathy with that which is best in human nature, and appeals to it. [ Chapin ]
Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature. [ Quintilian ]
Good-nature is the very air of a good mind, the sign of a large and generous soul, and the peculiar soil in which virtue prospers. [ Goodman ]
Art, as far as it has ability, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master, thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. [ Dante ]
By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you an and ought to be as free a people at your brethren in England. [ Swift ]
Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; and beasts, by nature. [ Cicero ]
Commonsense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it: the difference is, therefore, in the degree, not nature. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
A beautiful woman with the qualities of a noble man is the most perfect thing in nature: we find in her all the merits of both sexes. [ La Bruyere ]
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A similitude of nature and manners in such a degree as we are capable of, must tie the holy knot, and rivet the friendship between us. [ F. Atterbury ]
The finest flowers of genius have grown in an atmosphere where those of Nature are prone to droop, and difficult to bring to maturity. [ Dr. Guthrie ]
When a woman pronounces the name of a man but twice a day, there may be some doubt as to the nature of her sentiments; but three times! [ Balzac ]
It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded. [ Montaigne ]
It is the very nature of grace to make a man strive to be most eminent in that particular grace which is most opposed to his bosom sin. [ Thomas Brooks ]
Nature loves nothing solitary, and always reaches out to something, as a support, which ever in the sincerest friend is most delightful. [ Cicero ]
The finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it, and this in either case is equally incurable. [ Fielding ]
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. [ Ben. Franklin ]
Each thing lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God. [ Chapin ]
Our understandings are always liable to error. Nature and certainty is very hard to come at; and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense. [ Marcus Antoninus ]
Nature gives healthy children much; how much! Wise education is a wise unfolding of this; often it unfolds itself better of its own accord. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Coarse kindness is at least better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness. [ George Eliot ]
Nature has given to women fortitude enough to resist a certain time, but not enough to resist completely the inclination which they cherish. [ Dorat ]
In Nature things move violently to their places, and calmly in their place; so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm. [ Bacon ]
The reason why the character of woman is so often misunderstood, is that it is the beautiful nature of woman to veil her soul as her charms. [ F. Schlegel ]
Without memory the judgment must be unemployed, and ignorance must be the consequence. Pliny says it is one of the greatest gifts of nature. [ Montaigne ]
Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The weariest and most loathed worldly life that age, ache, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature is a paradise to what we fear of death. [ William Shakespeare ]
Our humble lilies of the valley and our field sparrows are wise enough to tell us of Nature's overruling care, that makes happiness possible. [ Newell Dwight Hillis ]
To be endowed with strength by nature, to be actuated by the powers of the mind, and to have a certain spirit almost divine infused into you. [ Cicero ]
The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding. [ Addison ]
The birds, great Nature's happy commoners, that haunt in woods, in meads, and flowery gardens, rifle the sweets and taste the choicest fruits. [ Rowe ]
It is to teach us early in life how to think, and to excite our infantile imagination, that prudent Nature has given to women so much chit-chat. [ La Bruyere ]
In Nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Music would not be unexpedient after meat to assist and cherish nature in her first concoction, and send their minds back to study in good tune. [ Milton ]
Employment, which Galen calls nature's physician,
is so essential to human happiness that indolence is justly considered as the mother of misery. [ Burton ]
Friendship and love require the deepest and most entire confidence, but souls of a high character demand not communications of a familiar nature. [ Humboldt ]
To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature. [ Lowell ]
Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor. [ Montesquieu ]
Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only; it is the safeguard of justice, and the security of innocence. [ Adam Smith ]
Nature has directly formed woman to be a mother, only indirectly to be a wife; man, on the contrary, is rather made to be a husband than a father. [ Jean Paul ]
Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God. [ Jeremy Bentham ]
That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general. [ Schlegel ]
Nothing ought to be more weighed than the nature of books recommended by public authority. So recommended, they soon form the character of the age. [ Burke ]
We always make our friend appear awkward and ridiculous by giving him a laced suit of tawdry qualifications, which nature never intended him to wear. [ Junius ]
The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest. [ Emile Souvestre ]
The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein. [ Lowell ]
The happiest end of life is this: when the mind and the other senses being unimpaired, the same nature which put it together takes asunder her own work. [ Cicero ]
Not in nature, but in man is all the beauty and the worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for its pride. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, nature. [ Jeffrey ]
Nature intends that, at fixed periods, men should succeed each other by the instrumentality of death. We shall never outwit Nature; we shall die as usual. [ Fontenelle ]
What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
All these are elements of happiness - love of nature, acquaintance with the wide earth, congenial intercourse with superior minds, and abiding friendships. [ Charles W. Eliot ]
The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary. [ Emerson ]
Nature sent women into the world that they might be mothers and love children, to whom sacrifices must ever be offered, and from whom none can be obtained. [ Jean Paul ]
Love is an image of God, and not a lifeless image; not one painted on paper, but the living essence of the divine nature, which beams full of all goodness. [ Luther ]
It is a law of nature that fainthearted men should be the fruit of luxurious countries, for we never find that the same soil produces delicacies and heroes. [ Herodotus ]
There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire. [ Carlyle ]
The law of perseverance is among the deepest in man; by nature he hates change; seldom will he quit his old house till it has actually fallen about his ears. [ Carlyle ]
In all the world there is no vice Less prone to excess than avarice; It neither cares for food nor clothing; Nature's content with little - that with nothing. [ Butler ]
Enthusiasm is that effervescence of the heart or the imagination, which is the most potent stimulus of our nature, where it stops short of mental intoxication. [ Chatfield ]
We derive from nature no fault that may not become a virtue, no virtue that may not degenerate into a fault. Faults of the latter kind are most difficult to cure. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness. [ Lowell ]
The attempt to make one false impression on the mind of a friend respecting ourselves is of the nature of perfidy. Sincerity should be observed most scrupulously. [ William Ellery Channing ]
Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming.... Every green thing loves to die in bright colours. [ Ward Beecher ]
Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating, as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. [ Fuller ]
We are members of one great body. Nature planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole. [ Seneca ]
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince. [ Plato ]
Nature and art are too grand to go forth in pursuit of aims; nor is it necessary that they should, for there are relations everywhere, and relations constitute life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. [ Hare ]
Oh! why is daily bread indispensable to the poet and to the artist! This inexorable necessity darkens for them the joys of nature and the radiations of the beautiful. [ Mme. Louise Colet ]
Youth is like those verdant forests tormented by winds: it agitates on every side the abundant gifts of nature, and some profound murmur always reigns in its foliage. [ M. de Guerin ]
There is but one law for all; namely, that law which governs all law, - the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity; the law of nature and of nations. [ Burke ]
Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man. [ Theodore Parker ]
Everything runs to excess; every good quality is noxious, if unmixed, and to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. [ Emerson ]
There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties by which the foolish part of men's minds are taken are more potent. [ Bacon ]
The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will he honor who honors not the human? [ Lavater ]
Coleridge cried, O God, how glorious it is to live!
Renan asks, O God, when will it be worth while to live?
In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker. [ Ouida ]
The imputation of being a fool is a thing which mankind, of all others, is the most impatient of, it being a blot upon the prime and specific perfection of human nature. [ South ]
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did. [ Carlyle ]
Nature knows how to convert evil to good; Nature utilises misers, fanatics, showmen, egotists to accomplish her ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice. [ James Ellis ]
Certainly the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto Nature, is weak. [ Bacon ]
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity and perfection. [ Ruskin ]
Nature, mysterious even under the light of day, is not to be robbed of her veil; and what she does not choose to reveal you will not extort from her with levers and screws. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
My mind can take no hold on the present world, nor rest in it a moment, but my whole nature rushes onward with irresistible force towards a future and better state of being. [ Fichte ]
Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature. [ Sears ]
We ought to be thankful to nature for having made those things which are necessary easy to be discovered; while other things that are difficult to be known are not necessary. [ Epicurus ]
Unwillingness to acknowledge whatever is good in religion foreign to our own has always been a very common trait of human nature; but it seems to me neither generous nor just. [ Mrs. L. M. Child ]
Simple nature, however defective, is better than the least objectionable affectation; and, defects for defects, those which are natural are more bearable than affected virtues. [ Saint-Evremond ]
The finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. [ John Ruskin ]
Nature has given to each one all that as a man he needs, which it is the business of education to develop, if, as most frequently happens, it does not develop better of itself. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Monkeys, as soon as they have brought forth their young, keep their eyes fastened on them, and never weary of admiring their beauty; so amorous is Nature of whatever she produces. [ John Dryden ]
How apt nature is, even in those who profess an eminence in holiness, to raise and maintain animosities against those whose calling or person they pretend to find cause to dislike! [ Bishop Hall ]
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. [ Rousseau ]
If you keep Nature faithfully in view, the example of every thorough master will be of service to you; but if you merely cling to human work, all that you do will be but mannerism. [ Geibel ]
Adam knew no disease so long as temperance from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician; and innocence and abstinence would have kept him healthful to immortality. [ South ]
Great is the power of Eloquence; but never is it so great as when it pleads along with nature, and the culprit is a child strayed from his duty, and returned to it again with tears. [ Sterne ]
Good sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise. Good-nature, by which I mean beneficence and candor, is the product of right reason. [ Dryden ]
Examples teach us that in military affairs, and all others of a like nature, study is apt to enervate and relax the courage of man, rather than to give strength and energy to the mind. [ Montaigne ]
It is hard to personate and act a part long, for where truth is not at the bottom, Nature will always be endeavoring to return, and will peep out and betray herself one time or another. [ Tillotson ]
It seems that nature, which has so wisely disposed our bodily organs with a view to our happiness, has also bestowed on us pride, to spare us the pain of being aware of our imperfections. [ Rochefoucauld ]
A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low. [ Swift ]
Learning gives us a fuller conviction of the imperfections of our nature; which, one would think, might dispose us to modesty, for the more a man knows, the more he discovers his ignorance. [ Frances Kemble ]
Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature. [ James Freeman Clarke ]
He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilisation. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
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. [ Robert Hall ]
Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters? [ Alcott ]
He that had never seen a river imagined the first he met with to be the sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge we conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind. [ Montaigne ]
True worth is as inevitably discovered by the facial expression, as its opposite is sure to be clearly represented there. The human face is nature's tablet, the truth is certainly written thereon. [ Lavater ]
He who allows his happiness to depend too much on reason, who submits his pleasures to examination, and desires enjoyments only of the most refined nature, too often ends by not having any at all. [ Chamfort ]
Good-nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it, and certainly to everybody who dwells with them, in so far as mere happiness is concerned. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]
That inexhaustible good-nature which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather. [ Washington Irving ]
Truth contradicts our nature, error does not, and for a very simple reason: truth requires us to regard ourselves as limited, error flatters us to think of ourselves as in one or other way unlimited. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The tongue tells the thought of one man only, whereas the face expresses a thought of nature itself; so that every one is worth attentive observation, even though every one may not be worth talking to. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
A fair reputation is a plant, delicate in its nature, and by no means rapid in its growth. It will not shoot up in a night like the gourd of the prophet; but, like that gourd, it may perish in a night. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Judge every word and deed which is according to nature to be fit for thee, and be not diverted by the blame which follows; but if a thing is good to be done or said, do not consider it unworthy of thee. [ Marcus Aurelius ]
It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor, - a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness. [ Whately ]
Misery is so little appertaining to our nature, and happiness so much so, that we in the same degree of illusion only lament over that which has pained us, but leave unnoticed that which has rejoiced us. [ Richter ]
Nature has lent us life, as we do a sum of money; only no certain day is fixed for payment. What reason then to complain if she demands it at pleasure, since it was on this condition that we received it? [ Cicero ]
I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself. [ Froude ]
Trust to me, judicious mother: do not make of your daughter an honest man, as if to give the lie to Nature; make her an honest woman, and be assured that she will be of more worth both to herself and to us. [ Rousseau ]
Superstition is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do so with safety. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Affability, mildness, tenderness, and a word which I would fain bring back to its original signification of virtue, - I mean good-nature, - are of daily use: they are the bread of mankind and staff of life. [ Dryden ]
Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary. [ Hamilton W. Mabie ]
He that can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity, or disgrace himself by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank. [ Colton ]
Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions; and it is a fact that the same motions and muscles of the face are employed both in laughing and crying. [ Charron ]
Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. [ Theodore T. Munger ]
Poetry is musical thought, thought of a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of a thing, detected the melody that lies hidden in it, ... the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. [ Carlyle ]
The richest endowments of the mind are temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Prudence is a universal virtue, which enters into the composition of all the rest; and where she is not, fortitude loses its name and nature. [ Voltaire ]
Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and of its own nature; such as the beauty of sentiments, the grace of actions, the turn of characters, and the proportions and features of a human mind. [ Shaftesbury ]
Sing of the nature of women, and then the song shall be surely full of variety, - old crotchets and most sweet closes. It shall be humorous, grave, fantastical, amorous, melancholy, sprightly, - one in all, all in one. [ Marston ]
Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable celestial barrier, and the sacred air-castles of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality, and man by his nature is yet infinite and free. [ Carlyle ]
In art there is a point of perfection, as of goodness or maturity in nature; he who is able to perceive it, and who loves it, has perfect taste; he who does not feel it, or loves on this side or that, has an imperfect taste. [ Bruyere ]
A talisman that shall turn base metal into precious, Nature acknowledges not; but a talisman to turn base souls into noble, Nature has given us; and that is a philosopher's stone,
but it is a stone which the builders refuse. [ John Ruskin ]
As those that pull down private houses adjoining to the temples of the gods, prop up such parts as are continguous to them; so, in undermining bashfulness, due regard is to be had to adjacent modesty, good-nature and humanity. [ Plutarch ]
Nature builds upon a false bottom, seeks herself what she values in others, and is oftentimes deceived and disappointed. Grace reposes her whole hope and love in God, and is never mistaken, never deluded by false expectations. [ Thomas à Kempis ]
If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him. [ Mrs. Jameson ]
Great men are the fire-pillars in this dark pilgrimage of mankind; they stand as heavenly signs, ever-living witnesses of what has been, prophetic tokens of what may still be, the revealed, embodied possibilities of human nature. [ Carlyle ]
Reflect on death as in Jesus Christ, not as without Jesus Christ. Without Jesus Christ it is dreadful, it is alarming, it is the terror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is fair and lovely, it is good and holy, it is the joy of saints. [ Pascal ]
We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline dove's-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which have all this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
A taste for flowers and a love for the beautiful, as exhibited in the wonders of creative power, are evidences of a refined and sensitive nature, and peculiar traits of character which distinguish man from the lower order of animals. [ Celestia R. Colby ]
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation. [ Lowell ]
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
When all that is fond in our nature is most thoroughly awakened, when we feel most deeply and tenderly - even then, love is so conscious of its instability that we are irresistibly prompted to ask; Do you love me? Will you love me always? [ Balzac ]
Avarice often produces opposite effects; there is an infinite number of people who sacrifice all their property to doubtful and distant expectations; others despise great future advantages to obtain present interests of a trifling nature. [ Kochefoucauld ]
Government began in tyranny and force, in the feudalism of the soldier and the bigotry of the priest; and the ideas of justice and humanity have been fighting their way like a thunderstorm against the organised selfishness of human nature. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Let your sleep be necessary and healthful, not idle and expensive of time, beyond the needs and conveniences of nature; and sometimes be curious to see the preparation which the sun makes when he is coming forth from his chambers of the east. [ Jeremy Taylor ]
Persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul, wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
The study of art is a taste at once engrossing and unselfish, which may be indulged without effort, and yet has the power of exciting the deepest emotions, - a taste able to exercise and to gratify both the nobler and softer parts of our nature. [ Guizot ]
Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature, - takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz. the mind and the soul of man. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
The intelligence of affection is carried on by the eye only; good-breeding has made the tongue falsify the heart, and act a part of continued restraint, while nature has preserved the eyes to herself, that she may not be disguised or misrepresented. [ Addison ]
In Nature there is no dirt, everything is in the right condition; the swamp and the worm, as well as the grass and the bird, - all is there for itself. Only because we think that all things have a relation to us, do they appear justifiable or otherwise. [ Auerbach ]
Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they do not know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the freemasons sign - they reveal the initiated to each other. [ Mrs. Stowe ]
To cultivate a garden is to walk with God, to go hand in hand with nature in some of her most beautiful processes, to learn something of her choicest secrets, and to have a more intelligent interest awakened in the beautiful order of her works elsewhere. [ Bovee ]
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. [ Hippel ]
It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable. Let us begin where she begins, go her pace, and close always where she ends, and we cannot miss of being good naturalists. [ William Penn ]
Nature's noblemen are everywhere, - in town and out of town, gloved and rough-handed, rich and poor. Prejudice against a lord, because he is a lord, is losing the chance of finding a good fellow, as much as prejudice against a ploughman because he is a ploughman. [ Willis ]
It is not the nature of avarice to be satisfied with anything but money. Every passion that acts upon mankind has a peculiar mode of operation. Many of them are temporary and fluctuating; they admit of cessation and variety. But avarice is a fixed, uniform passion. [ Thomas Paine ]
Nature gives you the impression as if there were nothing contradictory in the world; and yet, when you return back to the dwelling-place of man, be it lofty or low, wide or narrow, there is ever somewhat to contend with, to battle with, to smooth and put to rights. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
The wild force of genius has often been fated by Nature to be finally overcome by quiet strength. The volcano sends up its red bolt with terrific force, as if it would strike the stars; but the calm, resistless hand of gravitation seizes it and brings it to the earth. [ Bayne ]
Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external Nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligences, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the labourers on the surface do not even dream. [ Longfellow ]
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the sombre countenance of ordinary nature; they are like music heard out of a workhouse. [ Berz ]
Nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. [ Voltaire ]
Good-nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty. It shows virtue in the fairest light; takes off in some measure from the deformity of vice; and makes even folly and impertinence supportable. [ Addison ]
Nature is sanitive, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. [ Emerson ]
We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament. [ Beecher ]
The higher enthusiasm of man's nature is for the while without exponent; yet does it continue indestructible, unweariedly active, and work blindly in the great chaotic deep. Thus sect after sect, and church after church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis. [ Carlyle ]
Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning. [ Burritt ]
Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature. [ Pascal ]
There are persons of that general philanthropy and easy tempers, which the world in contempt generally calls good-natured, who seem to be sent into the world with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike pond, in order only to be devoured by that voracious water-hero. [ Fielding ]
Nature eschews regular lines; she does not shape her lines by a common model. Not one of Eve's numerous progeny in all respects resembles her who first culled the flowers of Eden. To the infinite variety and picturesque inequality of nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying beauty. [ Whittier ]
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. [ Humboldt ]
Nature, when she amused herself by giving stiff manners to old maids, put virtue in a very bad light. A woman must have been a mother to preserve under the chilling influences of time that grace of manner and sweetness of temper, which prompt us to say, One sees that love has dwelt there.
[ Lemontey ]
Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars. [ Whipple ]
It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work. [ Theodore Parker ]
Great art dwells in all that is beautiful; but false art omits or changes all that is ugly. Great art accepts Nature as she is, but directs the eyes and thoughts to what is most perfect in her; false art saves itself the trouble of direction by removing or altering whatever is objectionable. [ John Ruskin ]
Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage. [ Victor Cousin ]
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you, know that the morning and spring of your life are past. [ Thoreau ]
The physical plagues and the calamities of human nature have rendered society necessary. Society has added to the evils of nature; the imperfections of society have created the necessity for government, and government adds still further to the woes of society: this is the whole history of humanity. [ Chamfort ]
Nature understands no jesting; she is always true, always serious, always severe; she is always right, and the errors and faults are always those of man. Him who is incapable of appreciating her she despises, and only to the apt, the pure, and the true, does she resign herself and reveal her secrets. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It is a great mortification to the vanity of man that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of Nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the underworkman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces which come from the hand of the master. [ Hume ]
Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape, to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation - the realization of an idea by an act of the will. [ John Sterling ]
It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause. [ Adam Clarke ]
Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Taking our stand on the immovable rock of Christ's character we risk nothing in saying that the wine of miracle answered to the wine of nature, and was not intoxicating. No counterproof can equal the force of that drawn from His attributes. It is an indecency and a calumny to impute to Christ conduct which requires apology. [ Abraham Coles ]
Neutrality in things good or evil is both odious and prejudicial; but in matters of an indifferent nature is safe and commendable. Herein taking of parts maketh sides, and breaketh unity. In an unjust cause of separation, he that favoreth both parts may perhaps have least love of either side, but hath most charity in himself. [ Bishop Hall ]
Every common dauber writes rascal and villain under his pictures, because the pictures themselves have neither character nor resemblance. But the works of a master require no index. His features and coloring are taken from nature. The impression they make is immediate and uniform; nor is it possible to mistake his characters. [ Junius ]
The works of nature and the works of revelation display religion to mankind in characters so large and visible that those who are not quite blind may in them see and read the first principles and most necessary parts of it, and from thence penetrate into those infinite depths filled with the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. [ Locke ]
The truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety. There is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike. [ Ruskin ]
Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass. [ Hazlitt ]
Good-nature is that benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others, and, consequently, pushes us on to promote the latter and prevent the former; and that without any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion. [ Fielding ]
Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; the passions are powerful pleaders, and their very silence, like that of Garrick, goes directly to the soul, but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in; it is the quackery of eloquence, and deals in nostrums, not in cures. [ Colton ]
Was man made to disdain the gifts of nature? Was he placed on earth but to gather bitter fruits? For whom are the flowers the gods cause to bloom at the feet of mortals? It pleases Providence when we abandon ourselves to the different inclinations that He has given us: our duties come from His laws, and our desires from His inspirations.
This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition. [ Cicero ]
The maxim of Cleobulus, Mediocrity is best,
has been long considered a universal principle, extending through the whole compass of life and nature. The experience of every age seems to have given it new confirmation, and to show that nothing, however specious or alluring, is pursued with propriety or enjoyed with safety beyond certain limits. [ Dr. Johnson ]
I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind; as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore. [ Melmoth ]
Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly; for then they would satiate us, and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent. [ Ruskin ]
Nature, at all events, humanly speaking, is manifestly very fond of color; for she has made nothing without it. Her skies are blue; her fields, green; her waters vary with her skies; her animals, vegetables, minerals, are all colored. She paints a great many of them in apparently superfluous hues, as if to show the dullest eye how she loves color. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Hair is the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us, like love. It is so light, so gentle, so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with the angelic nature, - may almost say, I have a piece of thee here not unworthy of thy being now.
[ Leigh Hunt ]
It is not merely the multiplicity of tints, the gladness of tone, or the balminess of the air which delight in the spring; it is the still consecrated spirit of hope, the prophecy of happy days yet to come; the endless variety of nature, with presentiments of eternal flowers which never shall fade, and sympathy with the blessedness of the ever-developing world. [ Novalis ]
It is the nature of man to be proud, when man by nature hath nothing to be proud of. He more adorneth the creature than he adoreth the Creator; and makes not only his belly his god, but his body. I am ashamed of their glory whose glory is their shame. If nature will needs have me to be proud of something, I will be proud only of this, that I am proud of nothing. [ Arthur Warwick ]
We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man. [ Emerson ]
It is a hasty conclusion, and one which marks an inadequate apprehension of the nature of friendship, to say we lose a friend when he dies; death is not only unable to quench the genuine sense of friendship between the living and the dead, but it is also unable to prevent the going forth of a real feeling of friendship for the dead whom, it may be, we have never known at all. [ H. C. Trumbull ]
Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. [ Matthew Arnold ]
I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature. [ Sterne ]
The little flower which sprung up through the hard pavement of poor Picciola's prison was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here amid rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature. And O, the beautiful lessons which flowers teach to children, especially in the city! The child's mind can grasp with ease the delicate suggestions of flowers. [ Chapin ]
The little flower which sprung up through the hard payment of poor Picciola's prison, was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here, amid the rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature; and oh, the beautiful lessons which flowers teach to children, especially in the city! The child's mind can grasp with ease the delicate suggestions of flowers. [ E. H. Chapin ]
A woman at middle age retains nothing of the pettiness of youth; she is a friend who gives you all the feminine delicacies, who displays all the graces, all the prepossessions which Nature has given to woman to please man, but who no longer sells these qualities. She is hateful or lovable, according to her pretensions to youth, whether they exist under the epidermis or whether they are dead. [ Balzac ]
It is particularly worth observation that the more we magnify, by the assistance of glasses, the works of nature, the more regular and beautiful they appear, while it is quite different in respect to those of art, for when they are examined through a microscope we are astonished to find them so rough, so coarse and uneven, although they have been done with all imaginable care, by the best workmen. [ Sterne ]
The light of the sun, the light of the moon, and the light of the air, in nature and substance are one and the same light, and yet they are there distinct lights: the light of the sun being of itself, and from none; the light of the moon from the sun; and the light of the air from them both. So the Divine Nature is one, and the persons three; subsisting, after a diverse manner, in one and the same Nature. [ R. Newton ]
Socrates called beauty a short-lived tyranny; Plato, a privilege of nature; Theophrastus, a silent cheat; Theocritus, a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom; Domitian said, that nothing was more grateful; Aristotle afirmed that beauty was better than all the letters of recommendation in the world; Homer, that it was a glorious gift of nature, and Ovid, alluding to him, calls it a favor bestowed by the gods. [ From the Italian ]
How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, - the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. [ Channing ]
Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? [ Emerson ]
Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. [ Willmott ]
Columbus died in utter ignorance of the true nature of his discovery. He supposed he had found India, but never knew how strangely God had used him. So God piloted the fleet. The great discoverer, with all his heroic virtues, did not know whither he went. He sailed for the back door of Asia, and landed at the front door of America, and knew it not.
He never settled the continent. Thus far and no farther, said the Lord. His providence was over all. [ David James Burrell ]
How fitting to have every day, in a vase of water on your table, the wild flowers of the season which are just blossoming. Can any house be said to be furnished without them? Shall we be so forward to pluck the fruits of Nature and neglect her flowers? These are surely her finest influences. So may the season suggest the thoughts it is fitted to suggest. Let me know what pictures Nature is painting, what poetry she is writing, what ode composing now. [ Thoreau ]
In the hands of genius, the driest stick becomes an Aaron's rod, and buds and blossoms out in poetry. Is he a Burns? the sight of a mountain daisy unseals the fountains of his nature, and he embalms the bonny gem
in the beauty of his spirit. Is he a Wordsworth? at his touch all nature is instinct with feeling; the spirit of beauty springs up in the footsteps of his going, and the darkest, nakedest grave becomes a sunlit bank empurpled with blossoms of life. [ H. N. Hudson ]
What profusion is there in His work! When trees blossom there is not a single breastpin, but a whole bosom full of gems; and of leaves they have so many suits that they can throw them away to the winds all summer long. What unnumbered cathedrals has He reared in the forest shades, vast and grand, full of curious carvings, and haunted evermore by tremulous music; and in the heavens above, how do stars seem to have flown out of His hand faster than sparks out of a mighty forge! [ Beecher ]
It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk, In the wilderness alone, there where nature worships God.
It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great, where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. [ Sydney Smith ]
The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. [ Leigh Hunt ]
When I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom can escape him. [ Addison ]
Pride looks back upon its past deeds, and calculating with nicety what it has done, it commits itself to rest; whereas humility looks to that which is before, and discovering how much ground remains to be trodden, it is active and vigilant. Having gained one height, pride looks down with complacency on that which is beneath it; humility looks up to a higher and yet higher elevation. The one keeps us on this earth, which is congenial to its nature; the other directs our eye, and tends to lift us up to heaven. [ James McCosh ]
No process is so fatal as that which would cast all men in one mould. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations. It is to wear innumerable forms of beauty and glory. Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influences to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. [ Channing ]
The grandest operations, both in nature and in grace, are the most silent and imperceptible. The shallow brook babbles in its passage, and is heard by every one; but the coming on of the seasons is silent and unseen. The storm rages and alarms, but its fury is soon exhausted, and its effects are partial and soon remedied; but the dew, though gentle and unheard, is immense in quantity, and the very life of large portions of the earth. And these are pictures of the operations of grace in the church and in the soul. [ Cecil ]
Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation. [ Washington Irving ]
He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]
The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent. [ Emerson ]