Quotes About Nature And Meaning

#1. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

Joshua Foer

#2. Few things are more commonly misunderstood than the nature and meaning of theocracy. It is commonly assumed to be a dictatorial rule by self-appointed men who claim to rule for God. In reality, theocracy in Biblical law is the closest thing to a radical libertarianism that can be had.

R.J. Rushdoony

#3. Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism.

Caroline Emelia Stephen

#4. I don't ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.

Pete Hamill

#5. Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.

Carl Jung

#6. I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, "Are you at peace with yourself?" and he answered, "No, I'm at peace." It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

Alvaro De Campos

#7. It was not until much later when, after a deep and satisfying orgasm, I suddenly realised the true meaning of the fairy tale and the nature of the magic kiss of which it speaks.

Germaine Greer

#8. Also at times, on the surface of streams,
Water?bubbles form
And grow and burst
And have no meaning at all
Except that they're water?bubbles
Growing and bursting.

Alberto Caeiro

#9. The human spirit is so utterly one with the body that the term "form" can be used of the body and retain its proper meaning. Conversely, the form of the body is spirit, and this is what makes the human being a person.

Pope Benedict XVI

#10. Oft has good nature been the fool's defence, And honest meaning gilded want of sense.

William Shenstone

#11. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.

Thomas Merton

#12. We all have a divine nature, and we have a thirst to become one with that divinity. That divinity lets us find meaning in life event at the pinnacle of happiness, lets us weep for the pain and sorrow of others, and lets us dream of a more beautiful world. (p. 154)

Ilchi Lee

#13. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#14. She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

Dan Simmons

#15. The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something - such as goodness, truth and beauty - by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness - by loving him.

Viktor E. Frankl

#16. Even now, when I have time to consider what I've been and what I am, I doubt I comprehend my humanity, if I can claim so grand a word for my own morsel of life. I might as well be a meteor of a man, for all the difference I've made on earth.

Norman Lock

#17. Treasures are hidden and hard to find but if we could find a real treasure, it will shine our lives. In the similar way ultimate reality is hidden and hard to find but if we could find it, it will shine our lives.

Muditha Champika

#18. In Nature everything has a meaning; that is, every object is exactly adapted to the place it occupies, and to the purpose for which it was made.

Solomon Caesar Malan

#19. We must guard against becoming so engrossed in the specific nature of the roots and bark of the trees of knowledge as to miss the meaning and grandeur of the forest they compose.

George S. Patton

#20. One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.

Ada Lovelace

#21. The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Helen Garner

#22. The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.
But what does someone who hates and loves want with a sunset?

Alberto Caeiro

#23. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

Peter Matthiessen

#24. You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.

George Bernard Shaw

#25. If science wants to be truthful,
What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?
I close my eyes and the hard earth where I'm lying
Has a reality so real even my back feels it.
I don't need reason - I have shoulderblades.

Alberto Caeiro

#26. To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

E. O. Wilson

#27. True meaning in life comes through understanding your own nature and learning to accept all aspects of yourself.

Kristine Carlson

#28. Accept the universe
As the gods gave it to you.
If the gods wanted to give you something else
They'd have done it.

If there are other matters and other worlds
There are.

Alberto Caeiro

#29. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Cristina Garcia

#30. Nature and training (in any sport or art) can teach us all the spiritual laws I describe in another book, The Laws of Spirit. But now I'm happy to share these four purposes of life that lend meaning and direction to anyone's life, especially those in transition, going through changes.

Dan Millman

#31. If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.

Sylvia Dolson

#32. It's a difficult thing to describe theology, what it means and how it disciplines thinking. Certainly, theology is the level at which the highest inquiry into meaning and ethics and beauty coincides with the largest-scale imagination of the nature of reality itself.

Marilynne Robinson

#33. That lady has a piano.
It's nice, but it's not the running of rivers
Or the murmuring trees make ..

Who needs a piano?
It's better to have ears
And love Nature.

Alberto Caeiro

#34. Nature had seemed to be closing in on us for a kill, when she suddenly turned her face away and smiled. It was a Mona Lisa smile, the meaning of which no one could figure out.

Richard Preston

#35. And we will meet in the woods far far away from this hustle and bustle... and share love and sunshine.

Avijeet Das

#36. Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.

Claes Oldenburg

#37. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

George Eliot

#38. Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

Julian Baggini

#39. A name with meaning could bring up a child,
Taking the child out of the parents' hands.
Better a meaningless name, I should say,
As leaving more to nature and happy chance.
Name children some names and see what you do.

Robert Frost

#40. in exceptional circumstances - exceptional in that all circumstances in life are exceptional, especially those which are nothing in themselves and come to be everything in their results.

Alvaro De Campos

#41. Sound the tocsin of national peril and hordes of well-meaning folk with nothing much to do always materialize from nowhere. They itch to meddle in great matters of which their comprehension is usually pretty dim, and have no objection to getting their names and pictures in the papers.

Leslie McFarlane

#42. It's stranger than every strangeness
And the dreams of all the poets
And the thoughts of all the philosophers,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.

Alberto Caeiro

#43. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

Ayn Rand

#44. Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

Stephen Jay Gould

#45. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#46. A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.
But what is it, a row of trees? It's just trees.
Row and the plural trees aren't things, they're names.

Alberto Caeiro

#47. People come and go from our life; this is one of the most haunting laws of this nature. But these people teach us many things which we might not see at first but when they are gone, we really understand their meaning in our life.

Viraj J. Mahajan

#48. The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

#49. If language is to be of any use to us, then we ought to try and preserve the meaning of words, and 'god' historically has not meant the laws of nature.

Steven Weinberg

#50. Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

Rebecca McNutt

#51. Wonderful nature has a double meaning, which dazzles great minds and blinds uncultivated souls. When man is ignorant, when the desert is filled with visions, the darkness of solitude is added to the darkness of intelligence; hence, in man, the possibilities of perdition

Victor Hugo

#52. Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

Alvaro De Campos

#53. Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

Douglas Kennedy

#54. Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.

Frances Wright

#55. Let's only care about the place where we are.
There's beauty enough in being here and not anywhere else.
If there's someone beyond the curve in the road,
Let them worry about what's past the curve in the road,
That's what the road is to them.

Alberto Caeiro

#56. I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was. I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.

Wynn Bullock

#57. We are here among people who don't contemplate transience and the existence of the soul, the meaning of life and the nature of being. We are in a world in which man, crawling on the earth, tries to dig a few grains of wheat out of the mud just to survive another day.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

#58. You are one with your skis and nature. This is something that develops not only the body but the soul as well, and it has a deeper meaning for a people than most of us perceive.

Fridtjof Nansen

#59. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Flannery O'Connor

#60. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

#61. But the philosophical and scientific process which I call 'secularization' necessarily involves the divesting of spiritual meaning from the world of nature; the desacralization of politics from human affairs; and the deconsecration of values from the human mind and conduct.

Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

#62. This is the day when people reciprocally offer, and receive, the kindest and the warmest wishes, though, in general, without meaning them on one side, or believing them on the other. They are formed by the head, in compliance with custom, though disavowed by the heart, in consequence of nature.

Lord Chesterfield

#63. By nature, human beings search for ways to make sense and meaning out of their lives and their world. One way that we make meaning is through the telling of our stories. Stories connect us, teach us, and warn us never to forget.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

#64. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.

C.S. Lewis

#65. The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature and Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.

Anthony Collins

#66. The root meaning of phobo, the Greek term for fear, is "flight." That's the nature of fear. Fear causes us to run away from things that frighten us. And fear becomes sinful when it causes us to run away from the things God has commanded us to do. In

Wayne A. Mack

#67. As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#68. Lightly, lightly, very lightly,
A wind passes very lightly
And goes away, always very lightly.
And I don't know what I think
And I don't want to know.

Alberto Caeiro

#69. To find the meaning of life, enjoy the journey, the beauty of the nature, the glint of a dew drop, the warmth of the morning sun, the songs of the wind, and smiles of flowers. These are all there to make your journey worthwhile and make your life meaningful.

Debasish Mridha

#70. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens

#71. A philosopher is a deep thinker and a meticulous observer of nature and events that reveal the beauty, truth, and meaning of existence.

Debasish Mridha

#72. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?

Mary Doria Russell

#73. You can't show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is meaningless; by its nature, language is packed with meaning and emotion.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#74. It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ...

Jan Morris

#75. The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in
the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.

Howard Thurman

#76. And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting -
In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

Alberto Caeiro

#77. For me it has always been easier here, where only the fundamentals count, to learn what every man must learn in this world."
"And that, my lord?"
"Enough of the meaning of life to be ready to die.

Margaret Craven

#78. I was born subject like others to errors and defects,
But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,
Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..
Never to the defect of demanding of the World
That it be anything that's not the World.

Alberto Caeiro

#79. I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

Thor Heyerdahl

#80. Science is great for us. But for someone who see the human evaluation for more than one million years, science is a just a one instant and younger than a baby.

Muditha Champika

#81. The power of consumer goods ... has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropriating them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

#82. Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

Stephen Sondheim

#83. Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority.

Yuval Noah Harari

#84. Humankind's compulsion has always been to master the meaning of their world. Through the ages humans have time and again tried to proclaim the nature of existence. Yet the sun has continued to shine on an enigmatic world, with the most imponderable aspect of that world being humans themselves.

Stephen R. Harrison

#85. Real shapes and real patterns are things you would observe in nature, like the marks on the back of a cobra's hood or the markings on a fish or a lizard. Imaginary shapes are just that, symbols that come to a person in dreams or reveries and are charged with meaning.

Jim Woodring

#86. All the facts of nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, trebleor centuple use and meaning.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#87. Without a story there is no meaning.
And the nature of the meaning depends on the nature of the story.
To understand this is to understand the true power of stories.
And so, to control the stories, to be the one doing the telling...
Well now, wouldn't that be quite a thing...?

Steven Hall

#88. 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

#89. I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT WHEN I WRITE. I THINK ABOUT WHAT CAN'T BE KNOWN AND ONLY IMAGINED. I OFTEN SENSE A SPIRIT OR FORCE OR MEANING BEYOND MYSELF. I LEAVE IT OPEN AS TO WHAT THE SPIRIT IS, BUT I CONTINUE TO MAKE GUESSES.

Amy Tan

#90. The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning.

Cyril Connolly

#91. We create a meaningful life by what we accept as true and by what we create in the pursuit of truth, love, beauty, and adoration of nature.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#92. Approaching forty, I had a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.

Cyril Connolly

#93. All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,
Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.
Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.
To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.

Alberto Caeiro

#94. When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#95. I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.

Loren Eiseley

#96. Misery has only one meaning, that things are not fitting with your desires - and things never fit with your desires, they cannot. Things simply go on following their nature.

Rajneesh

#97. In a sense, photographs are highly literary, and the photographer, like the writer, has to be both a master of craft and a visionary. Patient accumulation of facts and then speculation about their meaning is the nature of authorship in both mediums.

Peter C Bunnell

#98. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).

Steven James

#99. Nature is infinite innovation and beauty that never repeats itself. Only man-made artifacts are endlessly repetitious, which is a principal reason our lives are so boring, full of anxiety and devoid of meaning.

Dee Hock

#100. Sometimes I'd yell questions at the rocks and trees, and across gorges, or yodel - "What is the meaning of the void?" The answer was perfect silence, so I knew.

Jack Kerouac