Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
—Franz Kafka
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
—Franz Kafka
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not.
You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
We are natural believers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.
—Blaise Pascal
All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.
—Plato
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
—Charles Darwin
The study of truth requires a considerable effort – which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge – despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.
—Thomas Aquinas
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Therefore the man of genius requires imagination, in order to see in things not what nature has actually formed, but what she endeavoured to form, yet did not bring about, because of the conflict of her forms with one another
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty, and a hatred for servitude.
—Julius Caesar
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
—Aristotle
The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveler.
—John Milton
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age.
—Isaac Newton
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience, it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.
—Blaise Pascal
Thus the sun which possesses light perfectly, can shine by itself; whereas the moon which has the nature of light imperfectly, sheds only a borrowed light.
—Thomas Aquinas
To be always fortunate, and to pass through life with a soul that has never known sorrow, is to be ignorant of one half of nature.
—Seneca
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
—Charles Darwin
History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.
—Georg Hegel
Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society’s fault.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Water is the driving force in nature.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
One has no right to love or hate anything if one has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature. Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you know it but little you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.
—Leonardo Da Vinci
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature..
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.
—Plato
To conquer oneself is the best and noblest victory; to be vanquished by one’s own nature is the worst and most ignoble defeat.
—Plato
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
—Plato