Destructive Nature Quotes & Sayings

All pain is per se and especially in excess, destructive and ultimately fatal in its nature and effects. — James Young

Another way in which the negative anima in a man's personality can be revealed is in waspish, poisonous, effeminate remarks by which he devalues everything. Remarks of this sort always contain a cheap twisting of the truth and are in a subtle way destructive. There are legends throughout the world in which "a poison damsel" (as they call her in the Orient) appears. She is a beautiful creature who has weapons hidden in her body or a secret poison with which she kills her lovers during their first night together. In this guise the anima is as cold and reckless as certain uncanny aspects of nature itself, and in Europe is often expressed to this day by the belief in witches. — C. G. Jung

So, whenever you find yourself putting forth great effort without success, you're trying to force something that won't fit under the circumstances. That's a destructive waste of time. And if that isn't enough to keep in mind, your techniques must always be allowed to evolve and change, in relationships, in life, in science, in society. Otherwise you stagnate, and you won't get anywhere in the long run ... You know what the philosopher Aldous Huxley said? He said 'Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. — Tony Vigorito

Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts. — Jules Verne

They have achieved a level of organization far beyond others of their species. Unfortunately, it is being used for destructive purposes at the moment. Don't look so surprised my dear, it's in the nature of the beast.'
'But these squirrels are not beasts!' Amber protested.
'Oh pish-posh, we are all of us beasts,' the professor replied lightly. 'The trouble comes when we try to pretend that we're not. — Janet Taylor Lisle

Everyone has a self-destructive nature in them. It's whether you feed it or not. You don't have to be a pop star to feel connected to destruction or self-destruction. But self-destruction is self-obsession, and self-obsession is not really possible if you're engaged in raising children. And if you have a spiritual life, you're constantly being asked to see yourself as one small fragment in the bigger picture. — Madonna Ciccone

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness. — Maureen Murdock

I don't think anybody should avoid mistakes. If it is within their nature to make certain mistakes, I think they should make them, make the mistakes and find out what the cost of the mistake is, rather than to constantly keep avoiding it, and never really knowing exactly what the experience of it is, what the cost of it is, you know, and all the other facets of the mistake. I don't think that mistakes are that bad. I think that they should try and not do destructive things, but I don't think that a mistake is that serious a thing that one should be told what to do to avoid it. — Anne Bancroft

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh. — Lauren Oliver

It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated. — David Bohm

Your habits play a massive role in your sinful nature. Our habits are shaped by either a self-disciplined will, or a powerful felt need - and the latter can often pull us into habitual sin. If you really think about it, most sin is derived from a habit that has been formed over an extensive period of time, and then exposes itself when that habit yearns to be activated. On the other hand, forming habits of prayer and worship can also create virtuous habits that can counteract the destructive pull toward sin. — Jarrid Wilson

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice. — John Steinbeck

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one! — John Keats

Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly. — Jean Liedloff

Romance and romantic are different. Death, itself, can be romantic. Nature and a destructive snowstorm can be romantic. Lovers in love but giving that up can also be romantic. There is something aesthetically romantic in beauty itself. And beauty can even be pain. Therefore, pain is romantic, especially when the sufferer does so for love. — R.B. O'Brien

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. — David Hume

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming! — Evelyn Waugh

This false conceptualization has been achieved by using an old socialist trick to obscure the massive environmental improvement that industrial capitalism brought. The trick is to criticize something by comparison to a nonexistent and impossible utopia. Socialists used this technique to criticize capitalism for causing poverty, even though capitalism inherited poverty - and cured it. Yet Marxists would attack capitalism's incredible contribution to human life, including to the life of laborers, by comparing that contribution, not to its predecessors and not to any known alternatives, but to a fictional socialist utopia whose advertised results contradicted everything known (even then) about socialism's destructive nature. — Anonymous

All in the eye of the beholder - Some of the most destructive forces in the world (Fire & Water), can also have the power of beauty. — Martin R. Lemieux

It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.
There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life. — George H. Smith

The destructive potential of language is contained within the very nature of representation. Words, particularly nouns, force an infinite of unique objects and processes into a finite number of categories. — Charles Eisenstein

By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life ... — John Muir

When men are engaged in war and conquest, the tools of science become as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a child of three. We must not condemn man because his inventiveness and patient conquest of the forces of nature are being exploited for false and destructive purposes. Rather, we should remember that the fate of mankind hinges entirely upon man's moral development. — Albert Einstein

Time, for example, is intimately connected with the goddess Kali, which partly accounts for her destructive nature. Energy - in Einstein's equation, E=MC2 - is personified in India as Shakti in her various guises. — Roger Housden

I've made four films about the destructive nature of relationships, of secrets and lies, and I think I'm no longer interested in that subject - which is a wonderful relief. — Ira Sachs

A wise person strives to reach self-transcendence by engaging in delicate contemplation, while avoiding the snare of self-denigration's negative invocation. An overshadowing sense of a caustic self can be destructive, whereas an encircling sense of a kindhearted self allows a person to express the profundity and elation of a feral creature curiously exploring nature's glorious playground. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I supposed the Red Guards had enjoyed themselves. Is it not true that we all possess some destructive tendencies in our nature? The veneer of civilization is very thin. Underneath lurks the animal in each of us. If I were young and had had a working class background, if I had been brought up to worship Mao and taught to believe him infalliable, would I not have behaved exactly as the Red Guards had done?
~79 — Nien Cheng

The selfishness of humanity is rooted in the self-destructive nature of man through sin. Romans 6:23 — Felix Wantang

Resistance, his all-encompassing term for what Freud called the Death Wish - that destructive force inside human nature that rises whenever we consider a tough, long-term course of action that might do for us or others something that's actually good. — Steven Pressfield

Every rebellion which is not in its own nature self-destructive, is an expression of the divine spirit. — Paul Carus

There is a big logical jump between acknowledging the destructive nature of hyperinflation and arguing that the lower the rate of inflation, the better. — Ha-Joon Chang

A Law of Nature, (Lex Naturalis) is a Precept, or general Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. — Thomas Hobbes

As human beings we have the same experience of destructive and constructive emotions. We also have a human mind capable of developing wisdom. We all have the same Buddha nature. — Dalai Lama

Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature! — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

We live on a planet that is amazing, beautiful, and full of wonder but not protected from powerful destructive forces of nature. We are capable of doing wonderful and selfless things but also self-absorbed and harmful things. This is the world we live in. — Adam Hamilton

Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature. — Robert Bork

To suffer destructive consequences is to obey laws in human nature — Sunday Adelaja

I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. — Newt Gingrich

But if love and friendship are weaknesses, they are basic human weaknesses: by which I mean that they are weaknesses so endemic to our nature that if one seeks, as the Stoics urge, to avoid being subject to them, one is likely to to get oneself into a worse position than one would be in if one simply accepted the weakness in oneself. The tendency towards, the need for, the various affections of love and friendship may be basic weaknesses in this sense because if one attempts to be utterly free of them, one will simply cover up one's needs and feelings and in the process give them free rein for subterranean mischief and eventual destructive effect within one's life. — Michael Slote

In relation to the natural world, the pleasure of Americans can be destructive in the same way that their work has already proved to be. It is not, certainly, a conscious destructiveness. But in that very unconsciousness it becomes an aspect of one of our worst national failings: our refusal to admit the need to be conscious. Or to put it more meaningfully: our refusal to admit that unconsciousness, in our time, is almost inevitably destructive. — Wendell Berry

Imagine a day when all plants and trees go on a strike, a bandh just for a day. All of us will die for want of oxygen." Reading this, I was instantly reminded of Bolivia's recent legislation (in December 2010) to grant all nature equal rights as humans. Justice William O. Douglas, writing against a 1972 decision by the United States Supreme Court, wrote, "Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation ... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life ... The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled. — Anonymous

The subconscious mind will translate into its physical equivalent a thought impulse of a negative or destructive nature, just as readily as it will act upon thought impulses of a positive or constructive nature. This accounts for the strange phenomenon which so many millions of people experience, referred to as "misfortune" or "bad luck." — Napoleon Hill

There is not a moment but preys upon you, - and upon all around you, not a moment in which you do not yourself become a destroyer. The most innocent walk deprives of life thousands of poor insects: one step destroys the fabric of the industrious ant, and converts a little world into chaos. No: it is not the great and rare calamities of the world, the floods which sweep away whole villages, the earthquakes which swallow up our towns, that affect me. My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature. Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself, and every object near it: so that, surrounded by earth and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart; and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

How can we expect to heal the world if we do not first heal ourselves? Society is a reflection of our actions and our behavior, which would explain why our violent and destructive nature correlates with a violent and destructive society. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Self-slaughter is an extravagant enactment of feeling sorry for oneself. Suicide is stingy act, because no matter how wretched our life may currently be, a person can always rise tomorrow and perform some small act of kindness for other people, care for a pet, or perform some other caring act that works towards preserving nature's graciousness. To die of their own hand is to cheat other people and shortchange Mother Nature; it is taking without giving back in kind. What combats suicide is a sense of gratitude, a willingness to give to other people, and to cease living life as a taker. Without a profound appreciation for all that is living and devoid of a sincere willingness to contribute to the flourishing of all life forms, one can callously write off the value of their own life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected - it includes everything - but perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways. — Shepherd Hoodwin

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power. — William Henry Harrison

Nature is powerful and beautiful,
Nature is destructive and creative,
Nature is amazing and wonderful,
Nature is loving and graceful. — Debasish Mridha

Nobles' sons are one of nature's great destructive forces, like floods or tornadoes. When you're struck with one of these catastrophes, the only thing an average man can do is grit his teeth and try to minimize the damage. — Patrick Rothfuss

I came away from the forums with a profound concern about the highly addictive and destructive nature of methamphetamine. Families are torn apart, lives are destroyed and treatment is difficult to get. — Greg Walden

We cry for the hand of God to bring us salvation, but then we seize the voice of God and use it to profess our destructive nature. — J.M. Campos

Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement from nature leaves us wanting,and when we want there is never enough. Our insatiable wanting is called greed. It is a major source of our destructive dependencies and violence. — Michael J. Cohen

Cells, tissues, and organs do not question information sent by the nervous system. Rather, they respond with equal fervor to accurate life-affirming perceptions and to self-destructive misperceptions. Consequently, the nature of our perceptions greatly influences the fate of our lives. — Bruce H. Lipton

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die. — Sherwin B. Nuland

Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive. — Margaret Mead

The destructive power of pride is that it countenances nothing higher than itself. Because of an inherent fault in our nature, man's bias is on the side of error. In our willful desire to live independently of God, we have severed the lifeline that flows from the source of all life. — Billy Graham

It is so difficult to, day in and day out, hear these incredibly painful stories of the destructive nature of our broken immigration system. — Luis Gutierrez

I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. — Stephen Hawking

I believe that the destructive nature of society that now threatens the existence of the entire human world has much to do with human intelligence. The way to overcome all human suffering-that also is through human intelligence. — Dalai Lama

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss! — Oliver Goldsmith

But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched — Margaret Atwood

Most relativists believe that relativism is absolutely true and that everyone should be a relativist. Therin lies the self-destructive nature of relativism. The relativist stands on the pinnacle of an absolute truth and wants to relativize everything else. — Norman Geisler

There is knowledge of God and the spiritual nature of man, as well as other types of reality ... , that are not reducible to the world dealt with by the so-called "natural" sciences. The idea that knowledge - and, of course, reality - is limited to that world is the single most destructive idea on the stage of life today. — Dallas Willard

Knowledge [...] no longer consists in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in the human person. — Ruth Nanda Anshen

You see, nature will do exactly what it must, and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a way, we will go. — Ralph Steadman

Only in our darkest hour do we find the light. Humans are destructive by nature. The world is lacking balance. Terrors are beginning to triumph over the simple joys. Stand back and watch, because you're going to be here when we fall. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Reviews are destructive by their very nature. — John Malkovich

When the days become longer and there is more sunshine, the grass becomes fresh and, consequently, we feel very happy. On the other hand, in autumn, one leaf falls down and another leaf falls down. The beautiful plants become as if dead and we do not feel very happy. Why? I think it is because deep down our human nature likes construction, and does not like destruction. Naturally, every action which is destructive is against human nature. Constructiveness is the human way. Therefore, I think that in terms of basic human feeling, violence is not good. Non-violence is the only way. — Dalai Lama

There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. — Tom DeMarco

Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation. Not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace - pollution and refuse, new illness and absolute destructive capacity - but the human framework is no longer under man's control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable. This is a wide-ranging social problem which concerns the entire human family. — Pope Paul VI

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about. — Mauricio Lasansky

Nothing cuts a neural route faster through the brain then a pinch of pain. Periods of unhappiness penetrate and scar the brain. Experiencing intense periods of unpleasantness incites us to grow. If we can bunt the destructive forces of extreme pain and embrace its forceful impact for its educational value, experiencing profound pain causes us to appreciate the pleasure of simply living in the moment, enjoying each blade of grass in nature's glorious bouts of beauty. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Neither parenting, Christian education, heritage, nor fine church involvement can alter anyone's essential sin nature. To lie, make self-centered choices, be destructive, or be deeply hurtful to oneself or others may be "out of character," but it is not outside of any human being's nature. — Rick Horne

When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature - when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all. — Michael Faraday

We are like water, aren't we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too. And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance. — Wally Lamb

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom. — Peter Wessel Zapffe

It is a turn of events that highlights a certain human arrogance about our destructive powers. It is only hubris to imagine that we can destroy nature, or the world. It is the mirror image of the industrialist's egotistical desire to exploit and control it. And it is true that we can kill off continents of forest and destroy species by the thousands, and even wreak climate change. But once we're gone, the rest of nature will rush on, as it has after so many other cataclysms, growing over and through and out of us. The apocalypse we can create is for ourselves and for our cousins, but not for life on Earth. — Andrew Blackwell

It's important to investigate the nature of anger because it is such a powerful energy and can be so destructive. When we can face our anger without being afraid of it, or angry about it, or defenseless in the face of it, then we can come close to it. When we are able to look closely at anger, we see the threads of different feelings - the sadness and the fear woven throughout it - and we can see its true nature. When we can uncover the helplessness and powerlessness that often feed anger, we transform them. In being mindful of these feelings, we actually use the sheer energy of anger - without getting lost in it or overcome by its tremendously deluding and fixating quality - to reveal instead the courage and compassion that have been concealed. — Sharon Salzberg

The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free. — Rachel Cusk

Aphrodite just kept smiling.
Because she was just doing what a goddess does-the same way that a tornado rips houses apart or a fire burns down a forest. — L.J.Smith

I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us! — Garth Stein

Loving the Earth with a fierce devotion can mean that we view the damage being done to nature as attacks on our own family and kinship group. The despair and rage we feel as witnesses to terracide, animal exploitation and the everyday callous disregard for the environment can be channelled into creating awareness, resistance efforts, the earth rights movement, and by rejecting the numbing and destructive values of Empire. By opening our hearts to the Earth in our thoughts, words, actions and cultural life we will find sacred purpose in the co-creation of an earth-honoring society. Our re-enchantment with the natural world is essential for devoting ourselves to eco-activism, environmental healing, earth restoration and rewilding, and the future rests with us! — Pegi Eyers

The writer Richard Manning has argued that 'the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command. — Phillip Connors

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use. — Wendell Berry

Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. — Richard Louv

AUTOSUGGESTION is the agency of control through which an individual may voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of a creative nature, or, by neglect, permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into this rich garden of the mind. — Napoleon Hill

Criticism of growth arose with the discovery that growth beyond a certain point is destructive of the earth. We are already using resources much faster than they can be replenished. We are producing wastes much faster than nature's sinks can process them. The growth economy will end. The only questions are when its end will come, and whether humanity will be able to survive its demise. — John B. Cobb

What you humans need to do is find beauty in the fact that something is naturally the way it is. Perhaps then you wouldn't be so destructive." [Meems says to Ellani] — A.L. Davroe

Even our rules and regulations, our laws, our policies, favor the destructive nature of taking too much from the ocean and using techniques that are horribly destructive. We know they don't work. We know it's not sustainable. — Sylvia Earle

A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of
its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a
social disease of a most destructive nature. — S.M. Sigerson

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. — Gretel Ehrlich

We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil's inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires pleasure, not power. Bodily pleasure is the source from which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an angry, frustrated, and hateful person. His thinking becomes distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-destructive attitudes. — Alexander Lowen

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. — Philip Shabecoff

I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage. — Marilyn Manson

We say it is the nature of the thing.Yet we find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding a women touts , nourishes, and protects destructive attitudes towards the deep instinctual and soulful nature. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

There was a much more self-destructive nature in 'Appetite.' It was a going-for-it-at-all-cost thing that worked then. — Axl Rose

It's something of a sacrilege nowadays to speak of insanity as anything but the chemical brain disease that on one level it is. But there were moments with my daughter when I had the distressed sense of being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too. (4) — Michael Greenberg

violent storms. and beautiful smiles. both have electricity. both are equally destructive in nature. — Sanober Khan