Details In Nature Quotes & Sayings

The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in. — Rupert Sheldrake

A few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. — Czeslaw Milosz

Odd, what a strange thing trust was. A week or so ago, she'd never have trusted Mr. Clark, not for the slightest instant. In that time, little had changed. He was still a blackmailer, still a forger. He was likely even still a liar.
But he'd saved her last night, and now they knew things of each other - things that seemed more important than such details as the name he'd been born with, or the nature of his revenge. He knew she had nightmares about the lock hospital; she knew he'd been in a fire brigade in Strasbourg. — Courtney Milan

The word "idiot" comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature. — Rebecca West

But where do they find these lines in nature? I can only see luminous or obscure masses, planes that advance or planes that recede, reliefs or background. My eye never catches lines or details. — Francisco Goya

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball. — Anton Chekhov

You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only. — Pablo Picasso

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique. — Neil Gaiman

Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer's voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of "Green River" by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son"; the oboes in Beethoven's Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience. — Daniel J. Levitin

Nature is a greater and more perfect art, the art of God; though, referred to herself, she is genius; and there is a similarity between her operations and man's art even in the details and trifles. When the overhanging pine drops into the water, by the sun and water, and the wind rubbing it against the shore, its boughs are worn into fantastic shapes, and white and smooth, as if turned in a lathe. Man's art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit. — Henry David Thoreau

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough. — Ray Bradbury

Are you two finished beatin' the hell out of each other? Mason, you slept with his sister, you know he deserved to get that punch in. Bellemy, you got your hit in. Now, leave it alone. He obviously loves her if he was willin' to call me for help."

Clay lifted his mug again, taking another sip before he continued.

"Next one of you to throw a punch is out of here and won't get to know what is goin' on. It's a courtesy that I even let either of you in here or tell you the details of the investigation. Don't take advantage of my kind nature. — Alex Morgan

By looking at the behavior of the cells in our own body, we can observe the most extraordinary and efficient expression of The Seven Spiritual Laws. This is the genius of nature's intelligence. These are the thoughts of God - the rest are details. — Deepak Chopra

The secret of Greek Art is its imitation of nature even to the minutest details; whereas the secret of Indian Art is to represent the ideal. The energy of the Greek painter is spent in perhaps painting a piece of flesh, and he is so successful that a dog is deluded into taking it to be a real bit of meat and so goes to bite it. Now, what glory is there in merely imitating nature? Why not place an actual bit of flesh before the dog? — Swami Vivekananda

The UU Professor of Anthropics had developed the Special and Inevitable Anthropic Principle, which was that the entire reason for the existence of the universe was the eventual evolution of the UU Professor of Anthropics. But this was only a formal statement of the theory which absolutely everyone, with only some minor details of a "Fill in name here" nature, secretly believes to be true. — Terry Pratchett

Religion is another name for the realization of Truth. It consists in becoming and being one with the Supreme Being. Doctrines and dogmas are only details of a secondary nature. — Narayanananda Swami.

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person's memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story. — Sonia Sotomayor

The Bible is full of evidence that God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things. But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop, eager to catch us in minor transgressions, but simply because God loves us
loves us so much that we the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life. It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass that is "renewed in the morning" or to put it in more personal and also theological terms, "our inner nature is being renewed everyday". Seen in this light, what strikes many modern readers as the ludicrous details in Leviticus involving God in the minuitae of daily life might be revisioned as the very love of God. — Kathleen Norris

Some people hear the voice of God in their dreams or through prayer or meditation. For me, God is truly in the details - the details found in the connections between the living things on the planet all working together to maintain the atmosphere and the soil. — Timothy Goodwin

Humility was an offensive characteristic for a God, in the eyes of early non-Christians. How could Christians worship a God who deliberately chose to share in human birth with all its mess and vulnerability and limitation, as well as a shameful death? How can we now worship a God to whom all the unimportant little details of our lives actually matter? How can we respect a God who takes us more seriously than we take ourselves, and yet is not impressed with all our accomplishments? Who loves us equally well, whetherwe succeed or fail? How could it really be that God simply disregards not only our education, our tastes, our industry, our niceness, our worthiness in order to love us? God's greatness we can begin to approach. The sheer humility of God's love is incomprehensible. — Roberta C. Bondi

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind. — Anton Chekhov

The beauty of the natural world lies in the details. — Natalie Angier

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim ... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah - scrutinising and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can't see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. That is the nature of science. — Carlo Rovelli

So often, over the course of our day-to-days, we forget the details of what shapes us most in life. Sure, we'll pay through the nose to have our weddings videotaped, but can we say the same thing about the first time we discovered masturbation, or the moment we realized that the true nature of the opposite sex is to lie and humiliate (and I'm not just talking about women here)? Usually not. — Kevin Smith

Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up , up , to greater things , so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet .Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite , veiled , yet never near , closer than the pulse of jugular , the sunburst that explodes at the center of a carpet signals this boundless radiance . Flowers and trees evoke the pleasures of paradise, and there is always a spot at the center of the carpet that brings calm to the heart. A single white lotus flower floats in a turquoise pool , and in this tiniest of details, there it is : a call to the best within , summoning us to the joy of union .in carpets , I now saw not just intricacies of nature and color , not just mastery of space , but a sign of the infinite design . In each pattern lay the work of a weaver of the world, complete and whole ; and in each knot of daily existence lay mine . — Anita Amirrezvani

Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure. — Thomas Hardy

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again. — E.L. Doctorow

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom - that the current economic and political system is the only possible one - the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin. — David Graeber

A state of total awakeness. In this state one is not only aware of that which one needs to be aware of in order to survive or to satisfy passionate goals, one is aware of oneself and of the world (people and nature) around one. One sees, not opaquely but clearly, the surface together with its roots. The world becomes fully real; every detail and the details in their configuration and structure become a meaningful unit. It feels as if a veil that had been in front of our eyes permanently - without our recognizing it was there - and had suddenly dropped away. — Erich Fromm

This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature . This idea . That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation. — Richard P. Feynman

In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.
("Hard Candy") — Tennessee Williams

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth's atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas's volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct. — Randall Munroe

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito. — Robert C. Solomon

The more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become, - that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us, - that the Gospels cannot be proved to have been written simultaneously with the events, - that they differ in many important details, far too important as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; - by such reflections as these ... I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. — Charles Darwin

Nothing is more consonant with Nature than that she puts into operation in the smallest detail that which she intends as a whole. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render. — Charlotte Bronte

Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification
crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes. — Roman Vishniac