Top 89 Short Nature Sayings
#1. Life is short, nature is hostile, and man is ridiculous; but oddly enough most misfortunes have their compensations, and with a certain humour and a good deal of horse-sense one can make a fairly good job of what is after all a matter of very small consequence.
W. Somerset Maugham
#2. Nature [has] implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.
Thomas Jefferson
#3. That pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!
Vita Sackville-West
#4. And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by his hand alone that guides nature and fate.
Anne Bradstreet
#5. Nature will eventually do what nature has always done. It will respond in a self-stabilizing manner over the long term with moderate variability over multi-decade periods and with occasional significant variability over the short term.
John H. Sununu
#6. Know, Nature's children all divide her care; The fur that warms a monarch, warmed a bear. While man exclaims, "See all things for my use!" "See man for mine!" replies a pampered goose: And just as short of reason he must fall, Who thinks all made for one, not one for all.
Alexander Pope
#7. Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
John Muir
#8. Even if you do the best you can in all things, your human nature must often fall short; so entrust yourself to God's goodness, for his goodness is greater than your failures.
Hadewijch
#9. With same day loans, you can easily acquire immediate funds, so as to deal with any short term financial crisis. These loans are unsecured in nature and can be applied for even by those with serious credit disputes.
Markus Skupeika
#10. Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.
Honore De Balzac
#11. Fanatics, as a class, have far more zeal than intellect and are fanatics only because they have. There can be no fanaticism but where there is more passion than reason; and hence, in the nature of things, movements originating in it run down in a short time by their folly and extravagance.
John C. Calhoun
#12. Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus not imitation ... From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life all movement and rhythm time and light, color and mood in short, all reality in Form and Thought.
Hans Hofmann
#13. Boughs are daily rifled By the gusty thieves, And the book of Nature Getteth short of leaves.
Thomas Hood
#14. Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."
John Daly
#15. If you fall into poverty, live that way without grumbling - then your poverty will not burden you. Likewise, if you are rich, live with your riches. All this is the functioning of Buddha-nature. In short, Buddha-nature has the quality of infinite adaptability.
Philip Kapleau
#16. You know, I love stop-motion. I've done almost all the styles of animation: I was a 2D animator. I've done cutout animation. I did a CG short a few years ago, 'Moongirl,' for young kids. Stop-motion is what I keep coming back to, because it has a primal nature. It can never be perfect.
Henry Selick
#17. It is simply that in all life on earth as in all good agriculture there are no short-cuts that by-pass Nature and the nature of man himself and animals, trees, rocks and streams. Every attempt at a formula, a short-cut, a panacea, always ends in negation and destruction.
Louis Bromfield
#18. When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.
Feist
#19. A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
Keegan-Michael Key
#20. Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.
Marcus Aurelius
#21. Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.
Ruth Ozeki
#22. Life is an island. People come out of the sea, cross the island, and return to the sea. But this short life is long and beautiful. In getting to know nature man exalts the wonder and beauty of life.
Martiros Saryan
#23. Here for example the beautiful silver mirror of a river swells, a boy falls in, the water ripples sweetly around his locks, he sinks - and after a short while the silver mirror swells as before.
Adalbert Stifter
#24. Time has been called God's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once. In the same spirit, noise is Nature's way of making sure that we don't find out everything that happens. Noise, in short, is the protector of information.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#25. Where there are large powers with little ambition, nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.
Henry Taylor
#26. For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#27. There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.
Joseph Addison
#28. A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#29. Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?
Solomon Short
#30. Short form media is reductionist by nature.
Jon Krakauer
#31. Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?
Liu Cixin
#32. God has given this way of life to Israel: to abstain from everything which is contrary to nature, that is to say, anger, fits of passion, jealousy, hatred and slandering the brethren; in short, everything that is characteristic of the old man.
Poemen
#33. Our Nature is so Beautiful that we come eyes to short if we be on the right place.
Jan Jansen
Jan Jansen
#34. A man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.
William Faulkner
#35. Human nature has been sold short ... [humans have] a higher nature which ... includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.
Abraham Maslow
#36. It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together.
Sylvia Earle
#37. Nothing is sudden in nature: whereas the slightest storms are forecasted several days in advance, the destruction of the world must have been announced several years beforehand by heat waves, by winds, by meteorites, in short, by an infinity of phenomena.
Nicolas Antoine Boulanger
#38. One sees differently with color photography than black-and-white ... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.
Ansel Adams
#39. We know much of a writer by his style. An open and imperious disposition is shown in short sentences, direct and energetic. A secretive and proud mind is cold and obscure in style. An affectionate and imaginative nature pours out luxuriantly, and blossoms all over with ornament.
Henry Ward Beecher
#40. As people we narrowly get by with our lives each day, energy from our soft, delicate actions appearing like cherry blossoms, only once, and once for a short while. Eventually petals fall to the ground.
Banana Yoshimoto
#41. The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.
Doug Aitken
#42. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#43. It's a basic rule of human nature that the promise of unexpected wealth short-circuits both intelligence and common sense.
Vikas Swarup
#44. I'll tell thee what it says; it calls me villain, a treacherous husband, a cruel father, a false brother; one lost to nature and her charities; or to say all in one short word, it calls me - Gamester.
George Edward Moore
#45. One thing I've learned from my short time trying to be a farmer is that our farmers have to be the bravest, most optimistic people in the world. To go back to the land year after year, after what nature throws at them and the world economy does to their income, takes a special kind of person.
Sara Henderson
#46. agencies began to downgrade scores of RMBS CDOs (short for 'residential mortgage-backed security collateralized debt obligations', the very term testifying to the over-complex nature of these products).
Niall Ferguson
#47. Due to their short bloom time, Sakura blossoms are a metaphor for life itself: beautiful yet fleeting. You'll realize when you're as old as me to hang on to the good times because they won't last forever.
Shannon Mullen
#48. Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.
Pliny The Elder
#49. It was not in her nature to stop short at half-measures, not to pause when once she had fixed her purpose. If she ever trembled on looking forward to the utter ruin she was about to encounter, her second emotion was to despise herself for such pusillanimity, and to be roused to renewed energy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#50. Flattery of the verbal kind is gross. In short, applause is of too coarse a nature to be swallowed in the gross, though the extract or tincture be ever so agreeable.
William Shenstone
#51. The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.
Guy De Maupassant
#52. The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#53. Most people ... find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
James A. Baldwin
#54. The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests ... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.
D.H. Lawrence
#55. 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
#56. Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. The nature of the writing and the nature of the animation meant that it had to be short.
Steve Dildarian
#58. One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge.
Peter Heather
#59. I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself ... In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.
Charles Burnett
#60. Looking at scenes of nature, for even a short while, can help us become more insightful, more creative, and more productive.
Maria Konnikova
#61. With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.
Kate Bernheimer
#62. The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.
Thomas Reid
#63. A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings ... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.
William Wordsworth
#64. Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rules will triumph - at least in the short run - over more ethically sensitive competitors.
Tony Judt
#65. Parenthood is harder than conventional work, the author suggests, because our jobs develop a somewhat predictable flow and offer relatively short-term feedback. This leads to internal comparisons to the improvisational nature of parenting
Jennifer Senior
#66. 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
#67. "The twins no longer derive their sustenance from Nature's founts - in short," said Mr. Micawber, in one of his bursts of confidence, "they are weaned ... "
Charles Dickens
#68. Given man's nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy, and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defense during the short period of time when we were potentially a part of the struggle.
Benjamin A. Rogge
#69. [N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.
Johann Baptist Metz
#70. The Christians made mental phenomena into independent beings, their own feelings into qualities of things, the passions which governed them into powers which governed the world, in short, predicates of their own nature, whether recognised as such or not, into independent, subjective existences.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#71. What an abundant harvest has been collected in autumn! The earth has now fulfilled its design for this year, and is going to repose for a short time. Thus nature is continually employed during the greatest part of the year: even in her rest she is active: and in silence prepares a new creation.
Christoph Christian Sturm
#72. If you desire truly to live you will cease trying to find magic tricks and short-cuts to life and learn the simple laws of being, and order your life in conformity with these. Realign your life with the laws of nature - this and this alone constitutes living to live.
Herbert M. Shelton
#73. There are so many things in this world. If we put it in short (succinctly), then what will remain? The 'pure Soul' and 'circumstances'. Moreover, to disperse is the nature of circumstances. Therefore, the Pure Soul will not have to tell them to go away.
Dada Bhagwan
#74. Is only a novel ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Victoria Connelly
#75. ...that's the nature of marine life and the inland bays I grew up on. You'd have to be a scientist, a poet and a comedian to hope to describe it all accurately, and even then you'd often fall short.
Jim Lynch
#76. One question keeps troubling me: Why? ... The short answer: I don't know. and yet that single word, why, remains the consummate human query. By nature, we're curious. We want to know.
Don Piper
#77. For thee, sweet month; the groves green liveries wear.
If not the first, the fairest of the year;
For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours,
And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers.
When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun
The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on.
John Dryden
#78. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
Donna J. Haraway
#79. Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them.
Marcel Proust
#81. If you're short, don't wear extremely high heels. After a certain age, you shouldn't wear little girls' clothes. That's going against your nature.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#82. The wellspring for the passion that drove public speech and action in behalf of the environment was in large part religious and ethical. Environmentalism, in short, had become one version of nature religion in the lingering shadow of American transcendentalism.
Catherine L. Albanese
#83. It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.
Orison Swett Marden
#84. Forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he'd come to realize, was a forgiving nature.
Lawrence Block
#85. A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand beckoning, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.
R.H. Blyth
#86. 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
#87. Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these. Nothing short of a recovery of the ancient virtue of pietas can absolve man from this sin.
Richard M. Weaver
#88. 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
#89. The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong.
Elinor Wylie
