Top 100 Quotes About Mankind And Nature
#1. I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#2. This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.
Desiderius Erasmus
#3. Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.
Rachel Carson
#4. Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.
Alexander Hamilton
#5. A row of daffodils and red tulips nestled against the walkway beneath my feet. Stray weeds peeked up through the cracks in the concrete, a reminder that that nature had the final say. No matter how much mankind bulldozed or built, all was vulnerable to Mother Nature's whims.
Pamela Crane
#6. 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.
James Russell Lowell
#7. I have an unshakable belief that mankind's higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess-hidden, it is true, but there all the same.
Helen Keller
#8. There are opinions and then there are opinions ... behold the nature of mankind.
Will Leamon
#9. Those walls and bars are there for a reason," said Crake. "Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases." "Them?" "Nature and God." "I thought you didn't believe in God," said Jimmy. "I don't believe in Nature either," said Crake. "Or not with a capital N.
Margaret Atwood
#10. It's obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. It's vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our 'carbon footprint', has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.
Charles Saatchi
#11. Actors are basically drag queens. People will tell you they act because they want to heal mankind or, you know, explore the nature of the human psyche. Yes, maybe. But basically we just want to put on a frock and dance.
Colin Firth
#12. All mankind lives in a state of terrible ignorance. In the opinion of food addicts, the consumption of cooked food is something quite natural, while nourishment by the laws of nature is an experiment, and a dangerous experiment at that.
Arshavir Ter Hovannessian
#13. Kindness and good nature unite men more effectually and with greater strength than any agreements whatsoever, since thereby the engagements of men's hearts become stronger than the bond and obligation of words.
Thomas More
#14. The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
John Simon
#15. Mankind has a divine duty, to be stewardship of the natural resources.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#16. Sensitive, responsive, eagerly welcomed everywhere, the drama, holding the mirror up to nature, by laughter and by tears reveals to mankind the world of men.
George Pierce Baker
#17. Jeremy Bentham opened his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with the famous sentence Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
Daniel Kahneman
#18. All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.
George Berkeley
#20. Nature is just to all mankind, and repays them for their industry. She renders them industrious by annexing rewards in proportion to their labor.
Baron De Montesquieu
#21. Thy plain and open nature sees mankind
But in appearance, not what they are.
James Anthony Froude
#22. The purpose of science is to develop, without prejudice or preconception of any kind, a knowledge of the facts, the laws, and the processes of nature. The even more important task of religion, on the other hand, is to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#23. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.
David Hume
#24. In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.
John Boyd Orr
#25. O why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest heav'n With Spirits masculine, create at last This novelty on earth, this fair defect Of nature, and not fill the world at once With men as angels without feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind?
John Milton
#26. Mankind is divided into two classes: those who, being artificial, praise nature, and those who, being natural, praise art.
Bertrand Russell
#27. 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?
Amos Bronson Alcott
#28. Mankind, by the perverse depravity of their nature, esteem that which they have most desired as of no value the moment it is possessed, and torment themselves with fruitless wishes for that which is beyond their reach.
Francois Fenelon
#29. 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.
John Dryden
#30. This festival ... the festival of Makar Sankranti ... is our way of showing love towards nature. While global warming poses a serious threat to the world and mankind, this message of love for our environment is extremely essential.
Narendra Modi
#31. America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government.
John Quincy Adams
#32. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Alexander Hamilton
#33. I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.
Marcel Proust
#34. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.
Thomas Huxley
#35. Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another.
Voltaire
#36. The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit a remedy.
Adam Smith
#37. The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38. Men are by nature wanderers ... Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#39. Mankind's ability to understand and control the forces of nature greatly exceeds our ability to govern ourselves
George Soros
#40. The nature of the leadership spirit is the inherent desire of all mankind to control and regulate both environment and circumstance.
Myles Munroe
#41. The beauty of the world and the orderly arrangement of everything celestial makes us confess that there is an excellent and eternal nature, which ought to be worshiped and admired by all mankind.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#42. The kingdom of God is a theocracy. And as it is the only form of government which will redeem and save mankind, it is necessary that every soul should be rightly and thoroughly instructed in regard to its nature and general characteristics.
Orson Pratt
#43. You've seen their logo - it's an apple with a bite taken out of it. That bite is the symbol of the moment mankind broke their pact with God, transgressed their own innocent nature, and chewed into consuming and consumerism. We have externalized all wonder, materialized our inherent magic.
Russell Brand
#44. [The poet] must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations, as a being superior to time and place.
Samuel Johnson
#45. What after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities, and courage to advocate them?
Jane Addams
#46. Why then seek to complete in a few decades what took the other nations of the world thousands of years? Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again.
James Bryce
#47. Of all men living [priests] are our greatest enemies. If it were possible, they would extinguish the very light of nature, turn the world into a dungeon, and keep mankind for ever in chains and darkness.
George Berkeley
#48. Animals shouldn't be hunted and nature shouldn't be disturbed, even destroyed, to benefit the whims of mankind
Charles Manson
#49. When we consider we are bound to be serviceable to mankind, and bear with their faults, we shall perceive there is a common tie of nature and relation between us.
Marcus Aurelius
#50. Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?
Joseph Conrad
#51. Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!
Immanuel Kant
#52. Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though everything is altered.
John Dryden
#53. Water is one of the basic needs of survival of mankind and water can destroy it, too. That is the power of NATURE. But there is an even more powerful dimension of NATURE which is a blessing to humans; courage, intelligence, compassion and the power to stand again.
Vikas Khanna
#54. Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#55. I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
E.B. White
#56. There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#57. The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
#58. 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
#59. It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Hannah Arendt
#60. There are no more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.
Joseph Addison
#61. Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.
Kazimir Malevich
#62. There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good-nature, or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity, which is what we express by the word Good-Breeding.
Joseph Addison
#63. Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.
Louise J. Kaplan
#64. Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton
#65. Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you
and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#66. Sky is grey, vegetation is plastic, and mankind is pale, for we have spent our days conceiving unnecessary tools for our arousal, and so we hide the nakedness of nature with brutal machinnes.
Shawn Lukas
#67. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.
John Locke
#68. It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates himself.
John Steinbeck
#69. To explain this a little further: Only the soul and the body are the natural constituent parts of men and women. The SPIRIT is not in the fundamental nature of humans but is the supernatural gift of God, TO BE FOUND IN CHRISTIANS ONLY.
John Wesley
#70. The natural world had gone badly wrong. Everything that mankind is doing on the planet had upset the delicate balance of nature. The pollution, the rampant industrialization, the loss of habitat-when animals were squeezed and cornered, they behave viciously, in a desperate effort to survive.
Michael Crichton
#71. Since the beginning of time mankind has used music and dance to commune with the spirit of nature and the spirit of the universe.
Goa Gil
#72. Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind.
Fakeer Ishavardas
#73. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.
Aristotle.
#74. A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
Gustav Stresemann
#75. Mankind is immortal
in the comic perspective not by virtue of man's subjugation of nature
but by virtue of man's subjection to it. The "fall" in tragedy ends in
death; the fall in comedy ends in bed, where, by natures's arithmetic,
one and one make a brand new one.
Rose A. Zimbardo
#77. The true nature of the gods is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind's thought, and influenced by the mind.
Dion Fortune
#78. Every right has its responsibilities. Like the right itself, these responsibilities stem from no man-made law, but from the very nature of man and society. The security, progress and welfare of one group is measured finally in the security, progress and welfare of all mankind.
Lewis B. Schwellenbach
#79. Whether at home or abroad, the task of statesman is to work with human nature warts and all, and to draw on instincts and even prejudices that can be turned to good purpose. It is never to try to recreate Mankind in a new image.
Margaret Thatcher
#80. Birds needs trees and mankind needs both of them! Protecting the nature and environment is not only a matter of ethics but also a matter of existence.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#81. Dogs are a gift to mankind. They are happy and joyful and loyal by nature. They are pure, positive energy and teach by example. That is all that's required of them.
Alyson Noel
#82. Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#83. There's one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law that's evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.
Tom Shadyac
#84. If any student comes to me and says he wants to be useful to mankind and go into research to alleviate human suffering, I advise him to go into charity instead. Research wants real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
#85. When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
Stephen Crane
#86. It has been my experience that people who are at cross-purposes with nature are cynical about mankind and ill at ease with themselves.
Indira Gandhi
#87. A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Umberto Eco
#88. As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined.
Isabella Beeton
#89. One of our greatest assets is that all men aspire to be equal and free. This fact haunts the rulers of the Kremlin today for even they cannot change this law of nature and they know it. It is up to us, not only by example but by positive acts, to make the most of this driving force within mankind.
Allen Dulles
#90. And you will, by the dignity of your Conduct, afford occasion for Posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to Mankind, had this day been wanting, the World had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.
George Washington
#91. Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others as long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous.
Thucydides
#92. It is necessary to mankind in general, that there should be religion in the world, absolutely necessary for the preservation of the honour of the human nature, and no less so for the preservation of the order of human societies.
Matthew Henry
#93. You [Mankind] have been given no particular function. You may give your life whatever form you choose, do whatever you wish ... you have no limitations, and can act in accord with your own free will. You alone can choose the limits of your nature.
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola
#94. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
William James
#95. I am certain and have always stressed that the destination of mankind is to become more and more humane. The ideal of humanity has to be revived.
Albert Schweitzer
#96. There is something mankind can never destroy in spite of an unreasoning will to destruction, and this is its own idealism, that integral part of its very being.
Radclyffe Hall
#97. That not adhering to those notions Reason dictates (concerning the nature of God), has been the occasion of all superstition, and those innumerable mischiefs that mankind (on account of religion) have done to themselves or to one another.
Matthew Tindal
#98. Is it that Nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enjoyments, and as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imag-ination in the spoil?
Oliver Goldsmith
#99. Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.
Adam Smith
#100. We cry for the hand of God to bring us salvation, but then we seize the voice of God and use it to profess our destructive nature.
J.M. Campos
