Quotes About Understanding Nature

#1. Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

Charles Sanders Peirce

#2. Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

Marilyn Ferguson

#3. The notion of Local Inertial Frame is crucial to understanding Nature and, in particular, General Relativity. Notwithstanding, very few popular science books (not even textbooks) emphasize enough its fundamental character.

Felix Alba-Juez

#4. To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

Marc Chagall

#5. A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method.

Robert A. Heinlein

#6. Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

Terry Riley

#7. Understanding God's great love for undeserving people such as us, gives us insight into His great majesty. As beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, so great love reveals the nature of the One who loves deeply.

Mike Bickle

#8. I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

Werner Herzog

#9. The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

Nikola Tesla

#10. The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

Richard Louv

#11. The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.

Immanuel Kant

#12. The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionably based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things.

Carl Jung

#13. I put my faith in Christ as a child. At a young age, I had a simple understanding of these basic facts: I was born a sinner; my nature is inclined toward sin. God, the Creator of all, establishes that there is punishment for sin. He will judge my sin, and I should receive His wrath.

Carrie Ward

#14. Witches try to 'connect' with the world around them. Witchcraft, they say, is about the tactile, intuitive understanding of the turn of the seasons, the song of the birds; it is the awareness of all things as holy ...

Tanya Luhrmann

#15. Take the decision in early March to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. It was made apparently without knowledge or understanding of the nature of his movement or how widespread it is.

Juan Cole

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Most Pagans are in agreement, treat yourself, others, animals and nature with respect. Just like many other religions the Pagan belief system often incorporates a desire to be a good person, kind, and understanding. There is no spread of hatred or violence.

Ginger Valentine

#19. I want to engage people in an honest, enlightened, and provocative conversation about the nature of erotic desire and the intricacies of intimacy and sexuality. The object of my game is to bring nonjudgmental, multicultural understanding to the challenges and choices of modern relationships.

Esther Perel

#20. History's peddler, chapman, drummer, canvasser, commercial traveler, hawker, and packman may be gone from our roadways. But their indomitable spirit and unflagging optimism, along with an understanding of human nature, will endure in each of us who choose to follow their lead.

Ronald Solberg

#21. Linnaeus had it constantly in mind: 'The closer we get to know the creatures around us, the clearer is the understanding we obtain of the chain of nature, and its harmony and system'.

Sten Lindroth

#22. Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.

Pythagoras

#23. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.

Andy Goldsworthy

#24. We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber boat beneath the water. But we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature.

Vernon Howard

#25. As you have seen the treachery of love because of me, I have seen my cruelty because of you. But you learned mercy from me, and from you I learned resilience. As you came to understand me enough to know the value I placed on selfless love, I understand your nature better.

D. Morgenstern

#26. Is my understanding sufficient for this or not? If it is sufficient, I use it for the work as an instrument given by the universal nature. But if it is not sufficient, then either I retire from the work and give way to him who is able to do it better,

Marcus Aurelius

#27. Early humans, bursting with questions about Nature but with limited understanding of its dynamics, explained things in terms of supernatural persons and person-animals who delivered the droughts and floods and plagues ...

Ursula Goodenough

#28. There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

Tony Campolo

#29. The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#30. The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding.

James Alison

#31. Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Peter Singer

#32. Jesus Christ, with His divine understanding of every understanding of our human nature, understood that not all men were called to the religious life, that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world, and, to a certain extent, for the world.

James Joyce

#33. One cannot understand ... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

Richard P. Feynman

#34. Don't talk to me about sense.
i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony.

Christopher Fowler

#35. Peace is a flawed logic. They believe that communication and understanding will create peace. However, just because you know and understand the nature of something or someone, does not mean that you will come to terms.

Lionel Suggs

#36. I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

Terence McKenna

#37. 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

#38. No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature ... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

Mary Webb

#39. Recognition of this kinship with the rest of the universe is necessary for understanding him, but his essential nature is defined by qualities found nowhere else, not by those he has in common with apes, fishes, trees, fire, or anything other than himself.

George Gaylord Simpson

#40. I would say much of religious heresy is the result of a misunderstanding of the basic nature of God. And once we have a proper understanding of God, then usually most of the areas of our life coincide with who God is and what He desires for each one of us.

Josh McDowell

#41. Nature's design is fully economical. Human design follows this model when it minimizes information and maximizes understanding.

Maggie Macnab

#42. The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

Francis Bacon

#43. No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

Lajos Egri

#44. In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.

Philip Gourevitch

#45. It is good and very grand to conquer external nature, but grander still to conquer our internal nature ... This conquering of the inner man, understanding the secrets of the subtle workings that are within the human mind, and knowing its wonderful secrets, belong entirely to religion.

Swami Vivekananda

#46. One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

Alison Gopnik

#47. If the will, which in the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness,
a horrid thought!

John Milton

#48. 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

#49. We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.

Carl Jung

#50. Understanding human nature. Perception. That's how I see acting - perception and communication.

Juliette Lewis

#51. God is consistent with his nature and declared purposes in Scripture, but he is not limited to our finite understanding of him or the ways we think he should work.

Craig S. Keener

#52. The Fibonacci Sequence turns out to be the key to understanding how nature designs... and is... a part of the same ubiquitous music of the spheres that builds harmony into atoms, molecules, crystals, shells, suns and galaxies and makes the Universe sing.

Guy Murchie

#53. The person who tolerates 'exactly' (with understanding) hands over his 'case' to nature. There is no need to punish anyone. Nature itself will punish him.

Dada Bhagwan

#54. Physics is becoming so unbelievably complex that it is taking longer and longer to train a physicist. It is taking so long, in fact, to train a physicist to the place where he understands the nature of physical problems that he is already too old to solve them.

Eugene Paul Wigner

#55. Even when we do our very best to treat those close to us with utmost respect and understanding, conflict happens. That's life. That's human nature.

Sharon Salzberg

#56. It is not enough just to read the Bible; it is even just as important to understand it. As to living it- that is accomplished in and through us by the Holy Spirit."


~R. Alan Woods [2013]

R. Alan Woods

#57. Man has one name, and many more than two natures. But the essential two are these: that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos ... A third element of man's nature is this: that he shall not understand what he is doing.

John Brunner

#58. Reserve is no more essentially connected with understanding than a church organ with devotion, or wine with good-nature.

William Shenstone

#59. ... it should be remembered that the atomicity of electric charge has already found its expression in the specific numerical value of the fine structure constant, a theoretical understanding of which is still missing today.

Wolfgang Pauli

#60. Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life - an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice?

Lisa Wingate

#61. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.

Anton Chekhov

#62. There exists a righteous unity between the temple and the home. Understanding the eternal nature of the temple will draw you to your family; understanding the eternal nature of the family will draw you to the temple.

Gary E. Stevenson

#63. It is our Spiritual nature to understand, accept and allow our human nature.

Maximus Freeman

#64. If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it's primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, 'What you don't have in your mind, you have on your shelf.' But now we have the Web.

Sylvia Earle

#65. Love without truth and honor is licentious in nature. Love without commitment is promiscuous and fleeting. Love without virtue and understanding is savage and selfish. Love without respect is short-lived. Love without these conditions is without God.

David W. Stevens

#66. Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true.

Susan J. Tweit

#67. Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

Malcolm Gladwell

#68. The evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

#69. Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act, an act of the whole nature.-Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.

Alexander MacLaren

#70. [Some scientific] experiments ... tell us that what we consider the objective world depends in some measure on our own conscious processes. There is no fixed eternal reality ... ... ... true understanding is not to be achieved with the rational mind.

Larry Dossey

#71. Understanding the nature of conflict leads to peace.

Lester B. Pearson

#72. We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.

Sean M. Carroll

#73. Our knowledge and understanding of nonhuman animals is polluted far more than we acknowledge by our belief in our own superiority, our unrecognized cultural programming, and our separation from nature.

Will Tuttle

#74. I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.

Robert Crumb

#75. As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#76. There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.

Saint Augustine

#77. Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.

John F. Kennedy

#78. The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#79. We have broken down the self-respecting spirit of man with nursery tales and priestly threats, and we dare to assert, that inproportion as we have prostrated our understanding and degraded our nature, we have exhibited virtue, wisdom, and happiness, in our words, our actions, and our lives!

Frances Wright

#80. Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

Jacob Bronowski

#81. I'm completely at ease on a set. I'm pretty comfortable most places, but hitting the mark and knowing set etiquette and understanding cameras and lenses are second nature. It's a language I've spoken for years.

Zoe Bell

#82. The majority of people in modern society feel separated - from the world, each other, and themselves. This feeling of separation is a resultfrom we humans attempting to separate ourselves from nature, and consequently forgetting who we really are.

Joseph P. Kauffman

#83. It is impossible to explain honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. I am sorry, but this seems to be the case.

Richard Feynman

#84. The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life.

Aristotle.

#85. The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

Leonardo Da Vinci

#86. Our view of nature will influence the way we treat nature, and our view of human nature will affect our understanding of human responsibility.

Ian Barbour

#87. This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.

Joseph Conrad

#88. Cate Blanchett is mesmerizing. I don't know why. It's beyond my understanding. Why we all want to work with her is she elevates the rest of us. She's just got some ethereal grace and elegance that's beyond me, and an acute understanding of human nature. She's just exquisite. She's otherworldly.

Brad Pitt

#89. The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.

David Mitchell

#90. There is not so contemptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged understanding.

John Locke

#91. Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship.

Brian L. Weiss

#92. When we speak of knowing God, it must be understood with reference to man's limited powers of comprehension. God, as He really is, is far beyond man's imagination, let alone understanding. God has revealed only so much of Himself as our minds can conceive and the weakness of our nature can bear.

John Milton

#93. Compassion is born from understanding suffering. We all should learn to embrace our own suffering, to listen to it deeply, and to have a deep look into its nature.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#94. What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.

Richard A. Falk

#95. Love is not merely need alone, & what is more important is loving you, & making my true nature comprehensible to you.

Qiu Miaojin

#96. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#97. The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.

Richard P. Feynman

#98. How we come to be, and how we are what we are, is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this, trying to understand the very nature of my existence.

John Eccles

#99. Teens are by nature, experimental learners. There is no real understanding of biology without the lab ...

Wendy Mogel

#100. All knowledge resolves itself into probability ... In every judgment, which we can form concerning probability, as well as concerning knowledge, we ought always to correct the first judgment deriv'd from the nature of the object, by another judgment, deriv'd from the nature of the understanding.

David Hume