Quotes About Nature Vs Civilization

#1. Nothing distresses the civilized person like unfettered nature. The Grand Canyon seen from behind the railing is indeed a splendid sight, but as soon as the desert reclaims your golf course that is another matter altogether.

Anthony Marais

#2. And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.

Richard Tarnas

#3. Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

Maureen Corrigan

#4. Moths lay their eggs where civilizations have been destroyed.

Marty Rubin

#5. A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

Edward Abbey

#6. The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn ... tired of common sense and civilization.

F.L. Lucas

#7. The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Margaret Fuller

#8. That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization

Thomas Huxley

#9. Civilization was a defense against nature's raw power.

Gregory Benford

#10. Is man's civilization only a wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst, infernal as ever?

Thomas Carlyle

#11. In another age we mastered the physical ocean, thereby creating universal civilization; now we will master the psychological ocean, emotion, mother human nature, thereby creating intellectual civilization.

Fernando Pessoa

#12. The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

Alan Watts

#13. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

Camille Paglia

#14. In yielding we are like the water, by nature placid, conforming to the hollow of the smallest hand; in time, shaping even the mountains to its will. Thus we keep duty and honor. We cherish clan and civilization. We are Chinese.

Bette Lord

#15. Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.

Carl Jung

#16. It (modernization) is just another jungle closing in.

Evelyn Waugh

#17. Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,' he said to himself, 'to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation.

Patrick O'Brian

#18. Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195

Robert Harris

#19. Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

Bertrand Russell

#20. The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilization, a tribute to the continuity of culture, a manifesto of man's determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.

David Daiches

#21. The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

Terence McKenna

#23. Where the human need for order meets
the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear.

Ian McEwan

#24. For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him

Jostein Gaarder

#25. Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

Al Gore

#26. All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.

John Stuart Mill

#27. 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

#28. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

Joe Haldeman

#29. The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The

Thomas Mann

#30. The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

Julian Barnes

#31. I think of myself as a kind of reporter; I report on the nature of certain events. I think of art as a report on civilization at a certain time.

Leon Golub

#32. I think ... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Tom Stoppard

#33. People have separated from each other with walls of concrete that blocked the roads to connection and love. and Nature has been defeated in the name of development.

Yasunari Kawabata

#34. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear - civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.
Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.
Men's Needs.

Arundhati Roy

#35. Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?

William Henry Harrison

#36. If you are trully in a place that is way from the noise of civilization,you can actually experience what real slience is about.It is filled with sounds of nature.There is a musicality,a harmony to it...

K.J. Kilton