Natural Elements Quotes & Sayings

The four elements: earth, water, fire and air; the qualities recognized by touch: cold, heat, dryness, and moisture; the temperaments: sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and saturnine; the faculties: natural, animal, and vital. — Noah Gordon

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God's wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something that will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure. — N. T. Wright

To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today. — Asger Jorn

"It is light that reveals, light that obscures, light that communicates. It is light I "listen" to. The light late in the day has a distinct quality, as it fades toward the darkness of evening. After sunset there is a gentle leaving of the light, the air begins to still, and a quiet descends. I see magic in the quiet light of dusk. I feel quiet, yet intense energy in the natural elements of our habitat. A sense of magic prevails. A sense of mystery. It is a time for contemplation, for listening - a time for making photographs. " — John Sexton

Okay. Right. Horror meets romance meets erotica meets fantasy meets hip hop. Throw in some leather and some Miami Ink shit, stir with a baseball bat and a tire iron, sprinkle on some baby powder, and serve over a hot bed of Holy-Mary-mother-of-God-this-has-to-work-or-I'm-going-to-be-a-lawyer-for-the-rest-of-my-natural-life.
No problem."
(J.R. Ward on the elements of writing the Black Dagger Brotherhood) — J.R. Ward

Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow. — Herb Ritts

Truman charged that Republicans were "Wall Street reactionaries," "gluttons of privilege," "bloodsuckers," and "plunderers." GOP legislators in the 80th Congress, he said, were "tools of the most reactionary elements" who would "skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed." Dismissing Dewey, "whose name rhymes with hooey," Truman said, "If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you're a bigger bunch of suckers than I think you are." "Give 'em hell, Harry!" the people shouted back. "Pour it on!"59 — James T. Patterson

Natural gas obviously brings with it a number of quality-of-life environmental benefits because it is a relatively clean-burning fuel. It has a CO2 footprint, but it has no particulates. It has none of the other emissions elements that are of concern to public health that other forms of power-generation fuels do have: coal, fuel oil, others. — Rex Tillerson

Long before being artists, we are artisans; and all fabrication, however rudimentary, lives on likeness and repetition, like the natural geometry which serves as its fulcrum. Fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. Its principle is that "we must have like to produce like." In short, the strict application of the principle of finality, like that of the principle of mechanical causality, leads to the conclusion that "all is given." Both principles say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need. — Henri Bergson

We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. — Jacques Barzun

I think connecting natural elements and musicology is probably pretty idiosyncratic of me, so it is hard to imagine anyone else going down that route. — Bjork

Result-oriented, low-tech, low-cost, shamanic medicine, uses natural elements, spirit, and the healing power of a caring community, as practiced by indigenous societies for millennia. — Itzhak Beery

The natural elements in the forests, mountains, deserts and large bodies of water, help shield you from the thought forms and auras of other human beings. — Frederick Lenz

An electronic instrument is just harboring a natural element the same way that a guitar is harboring an acoustic element. It's all nature, really. — Patrick Wolf

...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed... — Karl Polanyi

minerals. This experience again proved to me that what is termed disease is actually a deficiency which results from an imbalance in the natural environment. It also reminded me of the close relationship between the human body and the natural elements of the earth. — Joseph Dispenza

To be a holy person means that the elements of our natural life experience the very presence of God as they are providentially broken in His service. We have to be placed into God and brought into agreement with Him before we can be broken bread in His hands. Stay right with God and let Him do as He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit His other children. — Oswald Chambers

Foreign correspondence has a natural element of romanticism - and this could be seen as soon as that class of professional reporter emerged in the last half of the 19th century. — John Maxwell Hamilton

Layering and changeability: this is the key, the combination that is worked into most of my buildings. Occupying one of these buildings is like sailing a yacht; you modify and manipulate its form and skin according to seasonal conditions and natural elements, and work with these to maximize the performance of the building. — Glenn Murcutt

No one in hundreds of years has had that kind of power -- the power to control the elements. Not since the slaughter of the 1600's ... She has saved her greatest warrior for the moment when you are most needed. It is you, Isi, not us; you are the one destined to save the planet. We boys are just window dressing while you are the last knight of the Earth, pulled from her core and given from her heart to save us all. Haven't you noticed it? The flowers turn their faces to you, as if you were the sun. The most timid and previously abused bird curls up in your arms, as if it were her most natural place. When you are sad, the sky shares your sorrow and darkens in empathy. When you are happy, the moon throws herself into eclipse and the stars themselves wink at you to celebrate your joy. You are her daughter, the daughter of Earth, and she smiles when she sees you. — Sarah Warden

It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young. — Frederick William Faber

The effects of heat are subject to constant laws which cannot be discovered without the aid of mathematical analysis. The object of the theory is to demonstrate these laws; it reduces all physical researches on the propagation of heat, to problems of the integral calculus, whose elements are given by experiment. No subject has more extensive relations with the progress of industry and the natural sciences; for the action of heat is always present, it influences the processes of the arts, and occurs in all the phenomena of the universe. — Joseph Fourier

I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about
the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you? — Arthur Golden

The deep study of nature is the most fruitful source of mathematical discoveries. By offering to research a definite end, this study has the advantage of excluding vague questions and useless calculations; besides it is a sure means of forming analysis itself and of discovering the elements which it most concerns us to know, and which natural science ought always to conserve. — Joseph Fourier

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The — Salman Rushdie

Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense. — D.H. Lawrence

One makes advances. You do! You come to see what your story is like. That's part of the fun: to see how you can get the other elements that are not your natural interests or concerns primarily. — Peter Taylor

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration. The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural." This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction. — Howard Zinn

Racism is a destructive and artificially-manufactured element in the collective human psyche designed to fragment the natural desire of human beings to know and love one another — Jane Urquhart

Death Valley wasn't dead at all. It was asleep. It was simply waiting for the conditions of growth. When the conditions came, life returned to the heart of Death Valley.
Human beings and human communities are the same. We need the right conditions for growth, in our schools, businesses, and communities, and in our individual lives. If the conditions are right, people grown in synergy with the people around them and the environments they create. If the conditions are poor, people protect themselves and their anxieties from neighbors and the world. Some of the elements of our growth are inside us. They include the need to develop our unique natural aptitudes and personal passions. Finding and nurturing them is the surest way to ensure our growth and fulfillment a as individuals. — Ken Robinson

No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved's name in the outside world, and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions which we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see. — Marcel Proust

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life. (Will Durant, Story of Civilization, pg 1, vol. 1) — Will Durant

Fire and earth are the most sacred of the natural elements. One must cross their path with caution and respect. — Tracey M. Hook

The spirit of a government must be that of the country. The form of a government must come from the makeup of the country. Government is nothing but the balance of the natural elements of a country. — Jose Marti

Islam's middle position can be recognized by the fact that Islam has always been attacked from the two opposite directions: from the side of religion, that is too natural, actual, and tuned to the world; and from the side of science that it contains religious and mystical elements. There is only one Islam, but like man, it has both soul and body. — Alija Izetbegovic

A fundamental difference between our culture and Eskimo culture, which can be felt even today in certain situations, is that we have irrevocably separated ourselves from the world that animals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the complicated ends of our destiny. Eskimos do not grasp this separation easily, and have difficulty imagining themselves entirely removed from the world of animals. For many of them, to make this separation is analogous to cutting oneself off from light or water. It is hard to imagine how to do it. — Barry Lopez

The elements of instruction . . . should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge . . . . Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536). — Will Durant

Experimental architecture by its very nature is more prone to the depredations of time and natural elements than buildings made from conventional materials through traditional methods. Avant-garde architects often simply do not know how the products of their imagination will perform when implemented, especially if untested components are involved. — Martin Filler

While all bodies are composed of the four elements, that is, of heat, moisture, the earthy, and air, yet there are mixtures according to natural temperament which make up the natures of all the different animals of the world, each after its kind. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Ambient means the natural center or atmosphere of a space. All music has that in it- a space or center. I think it just means the atmosphere or what defines the environment of sound and maybe removing the more destructive, harsh elements and harder rhythmic elements and you get down to the stillness that's inherent. There's an ambient quality in every sound. You may have to enhance that to hear it or bring it out in a different way but there is that in every environmental sound. — Bill Laswell

There are those times when a woman fears she is on the brink of extinction or that the dreams and wants she had for her life are endangered. It is then she must declare herself a refuge and take whatever measures to preserve her natural elements."--Portion of the Sea — Christine Lemmon

Everything in life is built on principles - plants, seas, birds, all of the natural elements of nature, they all follow and obey certain basic fundamental principles. — Myles Munroe

The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive. — Jean Piaget

We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call 'I' is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd. — Anna Louise Strong

Balance is the natural state of life, because the basic characteristic of the fundamental element of life, pure consciousness, is complete balance. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that's always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature. — Bjork

In general, the more food we eat in its natural state - without additives - and the less it is refined, the healthier it will be for us. Food can affect the mind, and deficiencies of certain elements in the body can promote mental depression. — Ezra Taft Benson

I'm a nature lover, I want at any given time to be able to bring lots of plants into my house, have lots of light flooding in, have lots of natural elements. Reclaimed lumbers, actual live edge slab tables. I do love technology, but I want the TV to be hidden away a little, I want the speakers to be up on the ceiling. — Sebastian Clovis

Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers. — Plato

It is a profound mistake to imagine mistake to imagine that the art of combination depends only on natural talent, and that it cannot be learned. Every player knows that all (or almost all) combinations arise from a recollection of familiar elements. — Richard Reti

It is known that the Quran leaves an analytical reader the impression of disarrangement, and that it seems to be a compound of diverse elements. Nevertheless, the Quran is life, not literature. Islam is a way of living rather than a way of thinking. The only authentic comment of the Quran can be life, and as we know, it was the life of the prophet Muhammad. Islam is in its written form (the Quran) may seem disorderly, but in the life of Muhammad it proves itself to be a natural union of love and force, the sublime and the real, the divine and the human. This explosive compound of religion and politics produced enormous force in the life of the peoples who accepted it. In one moment, Islam has coincided with the very essence of life. — Alija Izetbegovic

When we make appreciation the central theme of our value system, then all the painful elements of our past become meaningful lessons we could not have done without. Acceptance becomes natural when we become adept at finding the silver lining, even in the most challenging circumstances. — Pooja Ruprell

I love Mix Tape. It combines three great elements - magic, music and a natural way of performing. I know that every time you perform Mix Tape you will feel like you're presenting someone with a very special gift. I've never come across a routine so natural and so strong. Use this and you will be the wonder worker they talk about long after you have left. — Luke Jermay

Our times seem to be so much about redefining where we are physical and where we're not. For me, it is really exciting to take the cutting edge technology and take it as far as it can get virtually, use it to describe/control the musicology or the behavior of raw natural elements, and then plug it with a sound source which is the most acoustic one there is - like gamelan and pipe organ. So you get the extremes: very virtual and very physical. In that way you shift the physicality. — Bjork

The weather, the plants, the animals, and our human survival are all inextricably linked. The natural elements were at war with one another because we abused our ecosystem. Abused our atmosphere. Abused our animals. Abused our fellow man. — Tahereh Mafi

When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron's twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion* does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star's natural life. — Sam Kean

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live. — Susanne Katherina Langer

One cannot use with impunity the different categories of beings-animals, plants, the natural elements-simply as one wishes, according to economic needs. One must take into account the nature of each being and its mutual connection in an ordered system, which is the cosmos. — Pope John Paul II

Crossing the Fens by boat there comes the realisation that water not earth or sky is the natural element in this landscape. — Stephanie Green

The interplay between farmers and the elements was a poem without words, the echo which would always return to him.
The air could hold the "breeze of the rain" or the "wind of warmth" to the discerning nose.
The stone carved its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it.
Fire was life in the hearth which was the center of home.
Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells. — John O'Donohue

Because, unlike courage and wisdom, which made our state brave and wise by being present in a particular part of it, discipline operates by being diffused throughout the whole of it. It produces a concord between its strongest and weakest and middle elements, whether you define them by the standard of good sense, or of strength, or of numbers or money or the like. And so we are quite justified in regarding discipline as this sort of natural harmony and agreement between higher and lower about which of them is to rule in state and individual. — Plato

They had all the means to develop a spinning machine, but "nobody tried" - another example of knowledge hampering optionality. They probably needed someone like Steve Jobs - blessed with an absence of college education and the right aggressiveness of temperament - to take the elements to their natural conclusion. As we will see in the next section, it is precisely this type of uninhibited doer who made the Industrial Revolution happen. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense. — Noam Chomsky

I like the way the word Witch connects us back through all the generations of those who went before us who harnessed the power of the elements and magick to improve their lives and deepen their connection with the natural world. — Deborah Blake

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being. — Rumi

Education is character development, harmonious completion of human personality. But what the state accomplishes in this field is dull drill, extinction of natural feeling, narrowing of the spiritual field of vision, destruction of all the deeper elements of character in man. The state can train subjects ... but it can never develop free men who take their affairs into their own hands; for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear. — Rudolf Rocker

The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard. — Algernon Blackwood

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence) — Harold Bloom

Water never waits. It changes shape and floes around things, and finds the secret paths no one else thought about the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth, it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and can sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can'survive without being nurtured by water. — Arthur Golden

There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel's laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type. — Julius Evola

I've been working with music videos and commercials, they are naturally very music driven and visual driven. So that feels like my natural element to be working with that. — Fredrik Bond

I have always been interested in the way that elements of stories twine and combine. At school I had an art teacher, a great influence on me, who disliked man-made objects unless they were old and showed the effects of time and wear; she loved all natural things. I share this attitude and it plays a large part in my writing. I'm fascinated by the ambiguity of man's relationship to the huge, mysterious universe around him; how, on the one hand, we make ourselves little boxes and think to exist safely and snugly in them; on the other, we extend our knowledge further and further into the limitless void; and yet from time to time these opposites collide and produce astonishing results. — Joan Aiken

It was the most beautiful view Shevek had ever seen. The tenderness and vitality of the colors, the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness such as he had never seen, except, perhaps, foreshadowed on a small scale in certain serene and thoughtful human faces. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We are all the products of nature composed with essential elements. Every natural force has an opposite. The components of earth, wind, water, and fire comprise nature. Similar to nature, we contain complementary, contradictory, and counterpoising elements. — Kilroy J. Oldster

One volcano in Hawaii, one volcano in Indonesia, produces enough gases in the atmosphere, which include those natural elements that are in the Earth's crust, that, uh, kind of make all the, you know, the science that we have about what we produce, moot. — Jim Gibbons

It seemed to me that one should make an effort to banish artificial classifications from chemistry and begin to assign to each element the place it must occupy in the natural order by comparing it in succession to others ... — Andre-Marie Ampere

One of the essential elements of government responsibility is to communicate effectively to the American people, especially in time of a potential terrorist attack or a natural disaster. — Vito Fossella

I was getting really influenced by some darker, heavier electro stuff, like Crystal Castles. And I was listening to some dub-step elements, so I thought this was going to be the natural progression, taking my soft melodies and my soft voice and marrying it with something a little heavier. — Lights

In a man's letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked. His letters are only the mirror of his heart. Whatever passes within him is there shown undisguised in its natural progress; nothing is invented, nothing distorted; you see systems in their elements, you discover action in their motives. Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale (1777) — Michael Kelahan