Top 100 Natural Philosophy Quotes
#1. Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
John Constable
#2. Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#3. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed, than an intrinsic love for the science itself.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#4. There is a ... matter - much more valuable and divine than natural philosophy ... On this matter I must speak to you in enigmas.
Plato
#5. Thanks to the high standing which science has for so long attain and to the impartiality of the Nobel Prize Committee, the Nobel Prize for Physics is rightly considered everywhere as the highest reward within the reach of workers in Natural Philosophy.
Guglielmo Marconi
#6. For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.
Aristotle.
#7. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
Carl Jung
#8. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#9. Live in the fields, and God will give you lectures on natural philosophy every day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10. I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.
Michael Faraday
#11. In every principle presented to us, our first inquiry should be, "Is it true?" "Does it emanate from God?" If he is its Author it can be sustained just as much as any other truth in natural philosophy; if false it should be opposed and exposed just as much as any other error.
John Taylor
#12. I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.
Natasha Trethewey
#13. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon
#14. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate.
Mary Shelley
#15. If your wish is to become really a man of science and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#16. I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose.
William Temple
#17. That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.
Thomas Paine
#18. We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.
Hannes Alfven
#19. We must reason in natural philosophy not from what we hope, or even expect, but from what we perceive.
Humphry Davy
#20. There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle
Michael Faraday
#21. The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
#22. All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.
Henry David Thoreau
#23. I am myself an empiric in natural philosophy, suffering my faith to go no further than my facts. I am pleased, however, to see the efforts of hypothetical speculation, because by the collisions of different hypotheses, truth may be elicited and science advanced in the end.
Thomas Jefferson
#24. But Dr. Smith says, and I believe it to be a true state of the case, that he himself gave a course of Lectures in Natural Philosophy, during the same winter, and that the money raised by them was also applied towards paying for the Orrery.
David Rittenhouse
#25. There is almost no evidence that diagnoses such as 'schizophrenia' and 'bipolar disorder' correspond to discrete entities ('natural kinds' in the language of philosophy).
Richard Bentall
#26. But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy.
G.K. Chesterton
#27. we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities
Carol J. Adams
#28. The intellectual controls the spiritual, the animal respects the natural.
Ray Davies
#29. The progress of mankind is due exclusively to the progress of natural sciences, not to morals, religion or philosophy.
Justus Von Liebig
#30. These divisions are illusory. What we call "nature" is merely one mode of the disclosure of the "supernatural," and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason's ascent into the light of God.
David Bentley Hart
#32. Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.
Christof Koch
#33. To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.
Carl L. Becker
#34. The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God's existence apart from divine revelation.
William Lane Craig
#35. If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them
Karl Marx
#36. Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.
Abhijit Naskar
#37. Good and evil are (only) labels that man - through religion and philosophy - created to explain and judge the Universe's natural cycle of creation and destruction. Creation was deemed good and destruction was deemed evil.
Russell Anthony Gibbs
#38. The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.
Leo Strauss
#39. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
#40. I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don't separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?
Etel Adnan
#41. Religion is a natural phenomenon of the human mind, but today, in the hands of theoretical bloodsucking religious preachers it has become a lifeless mockery. Now is the time that you take back religion from those intellectual idiots and place it where it belongs, in the temple of your inner cosmos.
Abhijit Naskar
#42. The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error. A condition of combat everywhere exists. We are born into perpetual conflict. It is our inheritance, even as it was the heritage of previous generations.
Ragnar Redbeard
#43. Remember that this earth is your abode. Keep it natural, clean, beautiful, and lovely for you and the future generations.
Debasish Mridha
#44. Humanism is the purest expression of your soul as a human. It has no God to be concerned with, except for the living Gods, that is the humans. It has no doctrine to abide by, except for the natural doctrine of love and benevolence. That's the religion we need my friend.
Abhijit Naskar
#45. Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.
John Campbell
#46. What is natural, needs to be looked upon, scrutinized and reshaped by each generation of the world, to make it compatible with the path of progress of a civilized society.
Abhijit Naskar
#47. Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.
Francis Bacon
#48. Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena. There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any. Nature simply exists.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#50. It is not a profession to be a pianist and musician. It is a philosophy, a conception of life that cannot be based on good intentions or natural talent. First and foremost there must be a spirit of sacrifice.
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
#51. As the natural world is one of the effects whose causes are in the spiritual world, and whose ends are in the Divine, it is impossible to understand the meaning of one link without having regard to the complete chain.
John Daniel
#52. Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.
Howard Pattee
#53. There is no right or wrong, no good or bad, only natural and unnatural, only cause and consequence.
Girish Kohli
#54. Fear is natural, but love is eternal. Never be fearful of love.
Debasish Mridha
#55. I am operating under the philosophy that I will simply use what I need and the rest - even if I still have it somewhere - is not mine. It is others'. It is for the healing of the natural world. And it is in the process of returning.
Tom Shadyac
#56. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
Henry David Thoreau
#57. Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#58. Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
Titus Lucretius Carus
#59. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
Thomas Bartholin
#61. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#62. A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.
Raymond Geuss
#63. In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies ...
Joseph McCabe
#64. No beauty product is going to give you ensurety about charm on your face. Its natural so natural ways can only help. Less tension , more laugh, more water.
Nikhil Yadav
#65. Health is the natural condition. When sickness occurs, it is a sign that Nature has gone off course because of a physical or mental imbalance. The road to health for everyone is through moderation, harmony, and a 'sound mind in a sound body'.
Jostein Gaarder
#66. Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.
Marcus Aurelius
#67. The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.
John Rawls
#68. No one worries terribly much about who the questions belong to, or whether a given contribution is really philosophy or, instead, properly nothing but science. Perhaps another way to put this is that, although I think that knowledge is a natural kind, I don't think that philosophy is.
Hilary Kornblith
#69. Nature make us more kind, more humane, more beautiful, and more natural.
Debasish Mridha
#70. Man's status in the natural world is determined, therefore, by the quality of his thinking.
Manly P. Hall
#71. But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.
Jose Marti
#72. What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.
David Hume
#73. The true wealth of a nation is not their natural resources but their achievements in education.
Debasish Mridha
#74. I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.
Ayn Rand
#75. Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
Socrates
#76. Elizabeth Rothra's excellent biography of Charles Torrey Simpson restates his philosophies about the intrinsic value of natural ecosystems like the Everglades. No one knew better than he the history of the plants and animals of South Florida or conveyed it with more humor and enthusiasm.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
#77. The person who can most easily take up natural agriculture is the one who doesn't have any of the common adult obstructing blocks of desire, philosophy, or religion ... the person who has the mind and heart of a child. One must simply know nature ... real nature, not the one we think we know!
Masanobu Fukuoka
#78. Mist lies over the river like the icy breath of winter angels. Darkness gathers round ... and it is beautiful.
Thank you for this life, this death, whatever it is you are
that makes us finally see.
Jay Woodman
#79. The natural order of life is not the thinking and imagination, but living in the moment, with absolute trust.
Roshan Sharma
#80. His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularized by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy.
James Joyce
#81. Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.
Gottfried Leibniz
#82. Electricity was a reality in the universe when Moses led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt. This is true of all natural laws; they have always existed but only when understood may they be used.
Ernest Holmes
#83. There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.
Guy Debord
#84. The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leavingthe world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason.
Thomas Hobbes
#85. Education in philosophy is energy speaking to energy, a higher perspective of spirit that is trying to awaken its next natural generation to something beyond the stupid appearances of things.
Kenny Smith
#86. It was pointed out that by "natural" there might here be meant either "normal" or "necessary", and that neither the "normal" nor the "necessary" could be seriously supposed to be either always good or the only good things.
G.E. Moore
#87. ... People who are the spices of this world are the natural souls with instincts and impulses that have not been pruned by evolution and civilization.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#88. Peace is inside us, it's a natural state of mind;
to find it, we create war, destroy the world like a blind.
Debasish Mridha
#89. What I mean by photographing as a participant rather than observer is that I'm not only involved directly with some of the activities that I photograph, such as mountain climbing, but even when I'm not I have the philosophy that my mind and body are part of the natural world.
Galen Rowell
#90. No one can take away your Natural Rights, but they can do great damage making you think they can.
J.S.B. Morse
#91. It should now be clear why the method of Philosophy is so different from that of the natural sciences. Experiments are not made, because they would be utterly useless.
Charles D. Broad
#92. The border between the natural and the supernatural, religion and philosophy, may not always be clear. But there are lines, and we should know and accept which side of it we are on.
Julian Baggini
#93. Money flows in from multiple sources, when you are truly focused on feeling good about what you are doing and living the present moment fully. If you think it has to be hard, then it is hard; if you decide it can be easy, natural, and flowing- you have opened the door.
Sheri Kaye Hoff
#94. Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy.
Epicurus
#96. Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better.
Lewis Thomas
#97. We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.
G.E. Moore
#98. Smoking will probably kill me, but so will natural selection.
Carroll Bryant
#99. To define twentieth-century humanism briefly, I would say that it is a philosophy of joyous service for the greater good of all humanity in this natural world and advocating the methods of reason, science, and democracy.
Corliss Lamont
#100. Morality exists in the neurons as a natural sensation. Religion only tries to codify it.
Abhijit Naskar
