Nature Can Be Cruel Quotes

#1. Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it.

Sherwin B. Nuland

#2. I have learned that Nature can be cruel, but I can be crueler!

Ren Hoek

#3. When it comes to death, nature is much more cruel to predators than predators are to their own prey

Elizabeth Lowell

#4. Nature is cruel and pitiless, so are successful states and people

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#5. A stern discipline pervades all nature, which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.

Herbert Spencer

#6. Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#7. Surely it isn't illegal here to complain about young people these days? How cruel. I had thought it a basic part of human nature, one of the few universally practiced human customs.

Ann Leckie

#8. But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secretes, showing where it's dishonesty commits a crime against nature.

Stefan Zweig

#9. There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#10. Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.

Alison Lurie

#11. We speak of love when we destroy nature.
It sounds like innocence of cruel arrogance.

Toba Beta

#12. Only seven or eight, and yet she knew so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to. One must admire Nature..

Jean Rhys

#13. Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal Lust Is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel; And, like the blast of Pestilential Winds, Taints the sweet bloom of Nature's fairest forms.

John Milton

#14. But man should abstain from judging his innocently cruel fellow creatures, for even if nature sometimes "shrieks against his creed", what pain does he himself not inflict upon the living creatures that he hunts for pleasure and not for food?

Konrad Lorenz

#15. Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower ...

Iris Murdoch

#16. No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.

Michel De Montaigne

#17. In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love.

Aberjhani

#18. Is cruelty a moral judgment if it is fundamental to forms of life? Who is man to say that the workings of nature, and therefore of the divine plan of which he himself is part, are cruel?

Charles Lindbergh

#19. The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#20. Denna is a wild thing," I explained. "Like a hind or a summer storm. If a storm blows down your house, or breaks a tree, you don't say the storm was mean. It was cruel. It acted according to its nature and something unfortunately was hurt. The same is true of Denna.

Patrick Rothfuss

#21. We must be cruel as well as compassionate: let us guard against becoming poorer than nature is!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#22. The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

Stephen Jay Gould

#23. Sometimes, I think that thugs learn to be brutal because people have been cruel to them. If you want to make a dog vicious, all you have to do is beat him for no reason. It's the same with a kid, only easier. You don't even need to beat him. Jeering and mocking him is enough.

Marie Sabine Roger

#24. I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height
teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.

Cory Doctorow

#25. What is life, except an ongoing instinct for survival? Nature uses that instinct to make us perform; otherwise we would all relax, and the species would disappear. Nature is a cruel green mother. The survival instinct is a goad, not a privilege.

Piers Anthony

#26. Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.

Donna Tartt

#27. Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.

Temple Grandin

#28. Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

Simon Barnes

#29. These were the moments I wished I were dead, when I was too weak to do anything about it. It was nature's cruel irony, stringing me along.

Pepper Winters

#30. Happy the man whom indulgent fortune allows to pay to virtue what he owes to nature, and to make a generous gift of what must otherwise be ravished from him by cruel necessity.

David Hume

#31. Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

Alan Bennett

#32. As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude ... in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.

Laura Kipnis

#33. I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God's amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.

Gary Numan

#34. Was not merely weak but also evil to throw away your life when so many had their lives or the promise of their future taken from them by cruel people or by the brutal forces of nature.

Dean Koontz