Little Things In Nature Quotes & Sayings

This is shitty to say, but there's not much pathos involved in a case like that. Think about it: Little So-and-so the Fourth drowns himself Tuesday night after receiving his midterm grades in the school of civil engineering. The body goes back to Westchester, and a lounge in the library or a nature path gets named after him, and a bunch of blue-blood kids remember him fondly. Sorry. There's about one story a year like that. Poor Billy Fuckup, Jr., in his Gap khakis, the pressure of going to classes all day really got to him. If I were a better person, I would have felt badly having seen things like that. — Cara Hoffman

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

Mowaljarlai rarely answered questions with an abstract explanation; he always told a story. His was not a fragmented world, divided into the convenient disciplinary languages and jargon that seem to be required for the understanding of concepts and principles in, for example, mathematics, physics, art and literature. Not only did he not have these languages; he thought this was a strange way to arrive at understanding the way in which the world lives in itself. It baffled him that whitefellas developed their knowledge by busting things up, reducing things to little pieces separate from everything else that contributes to their nature. For him, everything in creation is not only living and interconnected, but exists in a story and story cycle. Yet his knowledge of what whitefellas call 'science' was extraordinary."
p80-1. — Hannah Rachel Bell

Once that is clearly understood, I think that each of us can stay quietly in the state in which nature has placed him. since the middle station allotted to us is always far from the extremes, what does it matter if someone else has a slightly better understanding of things? If he has, and if he takes them a little further, is he not still infinitely remote from the goal? Is not our span of life equally infinitesimal in eternity, even if it is extended by ten years?
In the perspective of all these infinites, all finites are equal and I see no reason to settle our imagination on one rather than another. Merely comparing ourselves with the finite is painful. — Blaise Pascal

The name of medicine is thought to have been given from 'moderation', modus, that is, from a due proportion, which advises that things be done not to excess, but 'little by little', paulatim. For nature is pained by surfeit but rejoices in moderation. Whence also those who take drugs and antidotes constantly, or to the point of saturation, are sorely vexed, for every immoderation brings not health but danger. — Isidore Of Seville

The rishis of old attained the Knowledge of Brahman. One cannot have this so long as there is the slightest trace of worldliness. How hard the rishis laboured ! Early in the morning they would go away from the hermitage, and would spend the whole day in solitude, meditating on Brahman. At night they would return to the hermitage and eat a little fruit or roots. They kept their mind aloof from the objects of sight, hearing, touch, and other things of a worldly nature. Only thus did they realize Brahman as their own inner conciousness. — Ramakrishna

Who can estimate the real wealth that inheres in a fine character ... How base and mean money and huge estates look in comparison. All other things fade before it. Its touch is like magic to win friendship, influence, power. Can you afford to chill, to discourage, to crush out of your life this sweet, sensitive plant, which would flower in your nature and give added glory to your life, for the sake of a few dollars, a little questionable fame? — Orison Swett Marden

Some may think there is danger of setting too high a standard of action. I have heard teachers contend that a child will learn to write much faster by having an inferior copy, than by imitating one which is comparatively perfect; 'because,' say they, 'a pupil is liable to be discouraged if you give him a perfect copy; but if it is only a little in advance of his own, he will take courage from the belief that he shall soon be able to equal it.' I am fully convinced, however, that this is not so. The more perfect the copy you place before the child, provided it be written, and not engraved, the better. For it must always be possible in the nature of things, for the child to imitate it; and what is not absolutely impossible, every child may reasonably be expected to aspire after, on the principle, that whatever man has done, man may do. — Anonymous

From the gardener's point of view, November can be the worst month to be faced: Nature is winding things down, the air is cold, skies are gray, but usually the final mark of punctuation to the year as yet to arrive - the snow; snow that covers all in the garden and marks a mind-set for the end of a year's activity. There is little to do outside except to wait for longer days in the new year and the joys of coming holidays. — H. Peter Loewer

I myself, for instance, am not especially gifted, and am shy by nature, but my gracious and merciful God and Father inclined Himself to me, and when I was weak in faith He strengthened me while I was still young. He taught me in my helplessness to rest on Him, and to pray even about little things in which another might have felt able to help himself. — Hudson Taylor

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world. — Don DeLillo

Take this neat little equation here. It tells me all the ways an electron can make itself comfortable in or around an atom. That's the logic of it. The poetry of it is that the equation tells me how shiny gold is, how come rocks are hard, what makes grass green, and why you can't see the wind. And a million other things besides, about the way nature works. — Richard Feynman

A new day was starting, the things of the garden were not concerned with our troubles. A blackbird ran across the rose-garden to the lawns in swift, short rushes, stopping now and again to stab at the earth with his yellow beak. A thrush, too, went about his business, and two stout, little wagtails, following one another, and a little cluster of twittering sparrows. A gull poised himself high in the air, silent and alone, and then spread his wings wide and swooped beyond the lawns to the woods and the Happy Valley. These things continued, our worries and anxieties had no power to alter them. — Daphne Du Maurier

Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over. — Arundhati Roy

A lot of what I do is about being in the moment and I think that's hard for people to get. I like it when things suddenly affect the painting. I mix up this red and it affects the whole painting or this little bit of white falls down there, and something changes the whole nature of the thing. The residue on what happens, that's what's in the paintings. — Julian Schnabel

I am a little older and understand the nature of the business - the older you get the more your skills supposedly diminish, but I think I am getting wiser in how to use my physical skills. That's the frustrating part when you put so much heart and desire into things and feel like you are not wanted. — Randy Moss

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don't know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one's brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure - but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. — Edmund Burke

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined; but let the virtue of a definition be what it will, in the order of things, it seems rather to follow than to precede our enquiry, of which it ought to be considered as the result. It must be acknowledged that the methods of disquisition and teaching may be sometimes different and on very good reason undoubtedly; but for my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that are valuable. — Edmund Burke

I don't know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago? — Alan Lightman

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning ... I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished. — Allan Bloom

Jesus' throat hurt to speak. "I see you are disguising yourself in more humble appearance these days. Afraid of something?" "The jester from Galilee. I am impressed you can maintain your wits after so many days in my little home away from home." Belial spread his hands out, gesturing to the dry deadly expanse around them. "I will admit that the advance of civilization has made it somewhat disadvantageous for the Watchers to reveal our true nature or presence. Yes, we are working more behind the veil than we did in primeval days. On the other hand, the way things are going, I can foresee an age when humanity has turned religion into pretty fictions, and blinded themselves to our reality. Imagine the influence we will then have on ignorant fools who no longer believe in us. — Brian Godawa

Nobody told me about him [my grandfather], and he died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come crowing back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little illusions in flocks. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Little idea about my teacher:
1. First and foremost My Parents (Both are equal).
2. Next to all my respected teachers who taught me subjective as well practical knowledge, and help me to shape up as a responsible person.
3. Next to all my seniors and elder people who guided me in the path of progress time to time throughout my journey.
4. Next to all my beloved family and friends who are always stood along with me, no matter the time what it was?
5. Next to those entire know-unknown persons who has passed through journey and taught few lessons, tips.
6. Next is the nature, just see it, feel it & learn it.
7. Last but not least kids/children's- a lot of things, no worry, smiles, happiness, this is the best part of this journey.
So it's time to Salute the Real Commanders of our Life
HAPPY TEACHERS DAY
Original from: Amit Gupta — Amit Gupta

It is possible to learn the will of nature from the things in which we do not differ from each other. For example, when someone else's little slave boy breaks his cup we are ready to say, "It's one of those things that just happen." Certainly, then, when your own cup is broken you should be just the way you were when the other person's was broken. Transfer the same idea to larger matters. Someone else's child is dead, or his wife. There is no one would not say, "It's the lot of a human being." But when one's own dies, immediately it is, "Alas! Poor me!" But we should have remembered how we feel when we hear of the same thing about others. — Epictetus

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ...
Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. He was fascinated. — Terry Pratchett

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

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. — William Hazlitt

If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that - in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play. — Steven Weinberg

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true- that somehow you've fallen deep down into a Cordova story. I stared back at him. Be the good guy, he said. How do I know I'm the good guy? He pointed at me, nodding. A very wise question. You don't. Most bad guys think they're good. But there are a few signifiers. You'll be miserable. You'll be hated. You'll fumble around in the dark, alone and confused. You'll have little insight as to the true nature of things, not until the very last minute, and only if you have the stamina and the madness to go to the very, very end. But most importantly- and critically- you will act without regard for yourself. You'll be motivated by something that has nothing to do with the ego. You'll do it for justice. For grace. For love. Those large rather heroic qualities only the good have the strength to carry on their shoulders. And you'll listen. — Marisha Pessl

Faith seeks understanding: The more we know, the more we want to know. We see this principle at work in many ways. In a distorted way we are all aware of things like greed, or addiction, or lust. When one gains a little of these, the tendency is to seek more. That's because these disorders are simply acting upon the natural design of our human nature to want more. But that natural design was made to want more of God! And only when we use this desire for more of God are we functioning in the way we were made. So with faith we see this at work. The more one knows God, personally, truly, intimately, the more one wants to know God, love God and be with God all the more. And there is no limit to how much the human soul can receive of this glorious Gift! So seek God and let the gift of His presence in your life stir up the desire for more. — My Catholic Life!

And really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything they liked, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things, as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London, which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence, the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion. — Virginia Woolf

We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself. — John Berger

And, indeed it is a very pleasant thing for to ride forth in the dawning of a Springtime day. For then the little birds do sing their sweetest song, all joining in one joyous medley, whereof one may scarce tell one note from another, so multitudinous is that pretty roundelay; then do the growing things of the earth smell the sweetest in the freshness of the early daytime - the fair flowers, the shrubs, and the blossoms upon the trees; then doth the dew bespangle all the sward as with an incredible multitude of jewels of various colors; then is all the world sweet and clean and new, as though it had been fresh created for him who came to roam abroad so early in the morning. — Howard Pyle

If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon us, the answer must be that we discover the world is not constituted as we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety of its inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge of this sort can be taught to a child without in any way disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things. — Walter Lippmann

I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason.
Some years ago, when the "death of God" theology was a fad, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read "My God is not dead; sorry about yours." I guess my bumper sticker reads "My God is not cruel; sorry about yours. — Harold S. Kushner

I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful. — David Lynch

I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all: I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall. — Sir John Davies

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

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of all things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. — Aristotle.

In nature, we find so may things. At the water's edge, atop a mountain, or in the middle of a park, I watch my children flourish in who they are. With all the distractions, toys, and walls out of the way, the essence of who they are just shines. When I remember to pay attention, I see it radiating so strongly that I can't help but be brought right into it myself. My children are experts on breathing, on living; they know how to do it. And the open air? Why, that's breath itself. When I find myself in the midst of unsettling chaos-full of more commitments and expectations that we can really handle-I need to look no further than my little ones for the answer to what I've forgotten: Stop. Breathe. Listen. Then we head straight to the beach, or right to the woods, and play until we find ourselves restored. — Amanda Blake Soule

A beam or pillar can be used to batter down a city wall, but it is no good for stopping up a little hole - this refers to a difference in function. Thoroughbreds like Qiji and Hualiu could gallop a thousand li in one day, but when it came to catching rats they were no match for the wildcat or the weasel - this refers to a difference in skill. The horned owl catches fleas at night and can spot the tip of a hair, but when daylight comes, no matter how wide it opens its eyes, it cannot see a mound or a hill - this refers to a difference in nature. Now do you say, that you are going to make Right your master and do away with Wrong, or make Order your master and do away with Disorder? If you do, then you have not understood the principle of heaven and earth or the nature of the ten thousand things. This is like saying that you are going to make Heaven your master and do away with Earth, or make Yin your master and do away with Yang. Obviously it is impossible. — Zhuangzi

TELLING TIME

Before she was old, she took canoe trips in the rain

and buried her passions deep within nature poems.


Ten years before she was old, her husband died

and developers paid a mighty price for their dairy farm.


She knew she was getting old, when rest stops in Iowa

changed over to those crazy automated washrooms.


When she was old, God helped with little things (growing tomatoes in her garden)

but was missing on big ticket items (bringing her husband back).


She knew she had lived too long

when her grandson explained extinction to his stuffed polar bear. — Carol Baldwin

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand with a fountain pen. I'd type out a draft, mark up the typescript, type it out again. Once I paid a professional to type a final draft, but I felt I was missing things I would have changed if I had done it myself. In the mid-eighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction. I like the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer's memory - like an unspoken thought. I like the way sentences or passages can be endlessly reworked, and the way this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself. Until, of course, it sulks and crashes. — Ian McEwan

He turned to look at me straight on, and I saw a kind of purplish fire in his eyes, a hint that this whiny, plump little man was only showing me the tiniest bit of his true nature. I saw visions of grape vines choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. I knew that if I pushed him, Mr D would show me worse things. He would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life. 'Would you like to test me, child?' he said quietly. 'No. No, sir. — Rick Riordan

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture - exploit the new thing then move on.
There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are. — Jeanette Winterson

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves. — Martin Buber

They, therefore, who are hasty in their devotions and think a little will do, are strangers both to the nature of devotion and the nature of man; they do not know that they are to learn to pray, and that prayer is to be learnt as they learn other things, by frequency, constancy, and perseverance. — William Law

The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolises, however graciously and intently. The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary — Alain De Botton

...why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life... Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. And when you're all to yourself that way, you're really yourself for a little while; you get to thinking things through, alone. Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaudling, Esquire, once said, 'Dig in the earth, delve in the soul.' Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. — Ray Bradbury

In the nineteenth century, Fritjof Nansen wrote that skiing washes civilization clean from our minds by dint of its exhilarating physicality. By extension, I believe that snow helps strip away the things that don't matter. It leaves us thinking of little else but the greatness of nature, the place of our souls within it, and the dazzling whiteness that lies ahead. — Charlie English

Those soapbubbles that kid
Amuses himself with by blowing them from a straw
Are transparently a whole philosophy.

Clear, useless and fleeting like Nature,
Friends to the eyes like things,
They are what they are
With a little round airy precision,
And nobody, not even the kid who's making them,
Pretends they're more than they appear to be.

Some are hard to see in the clear air.
They're like a breeze that blows and barely touches the flowers
And we only know it's blowing
Because something lightens in us
And accepts everything more clearly. — Alberto Caeiro

Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion. — Richard Dawkins

Here in Tibet live the people my mother taught me to love before I met them. We are family, and love has undetermined aptitude and great hunger. I wander around town with a heavy heart. You can love a place as you love a person and it is especially easy to feel that way here, where man and nature are intertwined deeply. I commit to memory little things: the thin film of dust incited by the ends of chubas dragging on the earth; the gentle contours of the mountains; the steady gaze of a yak; the alacrity with which children submit to authority; the patience of women who sit in the main square with bottles of milk and yogurt for sale; the songs on the streets. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

But I'm learning it's human nature to want the things you can't have. What changes is how you go about pursuing the things you want. When you're a little kid and you're told no, you scream and throw a temper tantrum. When you're a teenager and your parents tell you no, you're old enough to internalize your temper tantrum. But you're smarter and you're sneakier this time around. So you nod and act like you care when they say no, when they tell you who you can be friends with, when they say the know what's best.
But then you go behind their backs to do it anyway.
Because at some point, you need to start calling the shots. At some point, you need to start believing you know whats best. Or, I thought with a smile, you just stop asking for their permission in the first place. — Katie Kacvinsky

Truly, from a very early age, I started distancing myself from other kids, not out of willingness, but just out of the nature of my energy. I liked to do things solely, and I already had a taste of the quest for perfection, which is unusual in a little kid. — Philippe Petit

While they were speaking of - in their opinion - great things, around about them only little things - also in their opinion - were happening: everywhere the bushes were turning green, the brooding earth was germinating and beginning to play with her first little Spring creatures, as one might with jewels. — Adalbert Stifter

There's little to see, but things leave an impression. It's a matter of time and repetition. As something old wears thin or out, something new wears in. The handle on the pump, the crank on the churn, the dipper floating in the bucket, the latch on the screen, the door on the privy, the fender on the stove, the knees of the pants and the seat of the chair, the handle of the brush and the lid to the pot exist in time but outside taste; they wear in more than they wear out. It can't be helped. It's neither good nor bad. It's the nature of life. — Wright Morris

Men mistook measurement for understanding. And they always had to put themselves at the center of everything. That was their greatest conceit. The earth is becoming warmer-it must be our fault! The mountain is destroying us-we have not propitiated the gods! It rains too much, it rains too little-a comfort to think that these things are somehow connected to our behavior, that if only we lived a little better, a little more frugally, our virtue would be rewarded. But here was nature, sweeping toward him-unknowable, all-conquering, indifferent-and he saw in her fires the futility of human pretensions. — Robert Harris

I desire to go through life knowing as little of evil in it as possible. To this end, I sometimes avoid looking too closely into the nature of things, studying them only so far as they seem to be good, and abandoning interest in them as soon as their darker feature begin to appear. The good only deserves a hearty interest. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Humanity cannot afford to acknowledge all of the blood that it spills and the destruction it inflicts on the world in its effort to perpetuate itself. Desacralization is a process that allows us to sever any relationship we might feel to other living things. By draining the aliveness out of things, we can pretend that our control and manipulation are of little consequence. Man the trapper becomes man the taxidermist, disemboweling nature of its spontaneity and movement, and stuffing it with a leaden inanimateness. — Jeremy Rifkin

There's something in human nature, I'm beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It's like looking - or talking - through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken. — Alan Bradley

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. — Robert Aickman

When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one — Marcel Proust

I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap. — John Patrick Shanley

The lower classes of people in Europe may at some future period
be much better instructed than they are at present; they may be taught
to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at
the ale-house; they may live under better and more equal laws than they
have ever hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it
possible, though not probable that they may have more leisure; but it is
not in the nature of things that they can be awarded such a quantity of
money or subsistence as will allow them all to marry early, in the full
confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous
family. — Thomas Robert Malthus

How do I talk to the flower?
Through it I walk to the Infinite.
And what is the infinite?
It is that silent, small force.
It isn't the outer physical contact. No, it isn't that.
The infinite is not confirmed in the visible world.
It is not in the earthquake, the wind or the fire.
It is that still small voice that calls up the fairies.
Yet when you look out upon God's beautiful world- there it is.
When you look onto the heart of a rose there you experience it- but you can't explain it.

There are certain things, often very little things, like the peanut, the little piece of clay, the little flower that cause you to look within-
and then you see the soul of things. — George Washington Carver

For me the number one reason is that us people with autism love the greenness of nature.
... Our fondness for nature is, I think, a little bit different to everyone else's. I'm guessing that what touches you in nature is the beauty of the trees and the flowers and things. But to us people with special needs, nature is as important as our own lives. The reason is that when we look at nature, we receive a sort of permission to be alive in this world, and our entire bodies get recharged. However often, we're ignored and pushed away by other people, nature will always give us a good big hug, here inside our hearts.
The greenness of nature is the lives of plants and trees. Green is life. And that's the reason we love to go for walks. — Naoki Higashida

Fear thou the judgments of God, fear greatly the wrath of the Almighty. Shrink from debating upon the works of the Most High, but search narrowly thine own iniquities into what great sins thou hast fallen, and how many good things thou hast neglected. There are some who carry their devotion only in books, some in pictures, some in outward signs and figures; some have Me in their mouths, but little in their hearts. Others there are who, being enlightened in their understanding and purged in their affections, continually long after eternal things, hear of earthly things with unwillingness, obey the necessities of nature with sorrow. And these understand what the Spirit of truth speaketh in them; for He teacheth them to despise earthly things and to love heavenly; to neglect the world and to desire heaven all the day and night. — Thomas A Kempis

With little here to do or see Of things that in the great world be, Sweet Daisy! oft I talk to thee For thou art worthy, Thou unassuming commonplace Of Nature, with that homely face, And yet with something of a grace Which love makes for thee! — William Wordsworth

Chyerti - that's us, demons and devils, small and big - are compulsive. We obsess. It's our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They're comforting. Sometimes little things change - a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it's no different, not really. Not ever. — Catherynne M Valente

The thing about a plant is, let's say it will have 50 or 100 little points of bright red. If you look at the thing as it goes down, it becomes green in a way ... It is way more spectacular than pointillist paintings where these things are played with, but never to the level of what happens in nature. — Robert Irwin

When you understand that your tax dollars pay for those tear gas canisters that were being fired into the crowd, and when you see that, and to know that a little bit of your fingerprint, your American DNA is a part of that, as well as those stealth bombers and that bomb that's lodged in the side of the school that has "Made in USA" on it in Gaza, and all of the unmanned drones that are blowing up weddings and things of that nature, to know that you pay for that, you really have - you don't have to do it now, but you need to think about that. — Lupe Fiasco

I felt I could turn the earth upside down with my littlest finger. I wanted to dance, to fly in the air and kiss the sun and stars with my singing heart. I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company. — Anzia Yezierska

Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pioneer, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will. — Alice Foote MacDougall

The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature — Graham Greene

The most evident difference between man and animals is this: the beast, in as much as it is largely motivated by the senses and with little perception of the past or future, lives only for the present. But man, because he is endowed with reason by which he is able to perceive relationships, sees the causes of things, understands the reciprocal nature of cause and effect, makes analogies, easily surveys the whole course of his life, and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sometimes, after they'd done the shopping, they would stop, each with his or her cart, in front of a bookstore that carried the paperback edition of his book. His wife would point to it and say: you're still there. Invariably, he would nod and then they would continue browsing the mall stores. Did he know her or didn't he? He knew her, of course he did, it was just that sometimes reality, the same little reality that served to anchor reality, seemed to fade around the edges, as if the passage of time had a porous effect on things, and blurred and made more insubstantial what was itself already, by its very nature, insubstantial and satisfactory and real. — Roberto Bolano

Obviously, when I learn about something new that I can do in my everyday life that makes a whole lot of sense and can help the environment, I do it. Eventually, it just becomes second nature. If we all begin to learn from one another and share some of the things we do, we just might be able to affect the world for the better through these little rituals. In a curious way, this would be a great wave of awareness: doing the right thing without being told to or having to think why. — Jennifer Aniston

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. — Spider Robinson

Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely - "A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night - he too would become adept in the lightning-change act. The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests - and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful. — Henry David Thoreau