Quotes & Sayings About Natural Forms

He [Maxime] was twenty, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most extreme forms of debauchery. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth. — Emile Zola

The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief. — Manly Hall

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection. — Maurice Wilkins

It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

In some central and important cases, ... the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action. — Raymond Geuss

The commonest forms of amateur natural history in the United States are probably gardening, bird watching, the maintenance of aquarium fish, and nature photography. — Marston Bates

The delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended ... — Mary Augusta Ward

Praying is the same to the new creature as crying is to the natural. The child is not learned by art or example to cry, but instructed by nature; it comes into the world crying. Praying is not a lesson got by forms and rules of art, but flowing from principles of new life itself. — William Gurnall

If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way. The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition. From this, of course, it does not follow that you can explain the existence of entities as complex as man by exactly the same principles on their own. It is no good taking the right number of atoms and shaking them together with some external energy till they happen to fall into the right pattern, and out drops Adam! — Richard Dawkins

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

Leonardo did not pursue science and engineering in order to dominate nature, as Francis Bacon would advocate a century later, but always tried to learn as much as possible from nature. He was in awe of the beauty he saw in the complexity of natural forms, patterns, and processes, and aware that nature's ingenuity was far superior to human design. Accordingly, he often used natural processes and structures as models for his own designs. — Fritjof Capra

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

A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don't try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable. — Robert Greene

I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life. — Antony Gormley

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day ...
To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way. — Terri Windling

But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence. — Frederic Bastiat

Is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed. The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and expression of life itself. — Aldous Huxley

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correlation of growth. In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals, thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In — Charles Darwin

Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sensual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. — Oscar Wilde

The dread of a permanently wicked human nature takes two forms. One is a practical fear: that social reform is a waste of time because human nature is unchangeable. The other is a deeper concern, which grows out of the Romantic belief that what is natural is good. According to the worry, if scientists suggest it is "natural" - part of human nature - to be adulterous, violent, ethnocentric, and selfish, they would be implying that these traits are good, not just unavoidable. — Steven Pinker

The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant. — Bill Gates

It became quite clear to me that the Natural Law mystique, in Catholic, libertarian or neo-pagan forms, remains basically a set of rhetorical strategies to hypnotize others into the state which Bernard Shaw called "barbarism" and defined as 'the belief that the laws of one's own tribe are the laws of the universe'. — Robert Anton Wilson

The 'law of wills and causes,' formulated by Comte, ... is that when men do not know the natural causes of things, they simply attribute them to wills like their own; thus they obtain a theory which provisionally takes the place of science, and this theory forms a basis for theology. — Andrew Dickson White

When what one does, reps, or 'spits', repetitively, is foul or beastly - one summons spiritual undertakers to dine on fleshly parasites. In various forms, nature's law purges all that becomes wasteful. Change your game, or the game will change you. — T.F. Hodge

It [appears] that however certain forms of government are better calculated than others to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights, and are at the same time themselves better guarded against degeneracy, yet experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. — Thomas Jefferson

In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history
an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms
gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C. — Richard Louv

Having worked so hard to have children, parents may feel it's only natural to expect happiness from the experience. And they'll find happiness of course, but not necessarily continuously, and not always in the forms they might expect. — Jennifer Senior

Transformation comes in a lot of different forms, but going natural really helped me love myself. — Jillian Hervey

My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity of the wonder of innumerable forms of life has always thrilled me beyond anything else. — Oliver Sacks

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being. — Russell Sherman

They came silently as ghosts themselves, swept along like leaves being scattered about them in the scurrying east wind. Yet their running forms seemed carved out by the wild landscape, in the natural facts of evolution, so they were almost perfectly camouflaged, shielded by the deepening colors of autumn change. — David Clement-Davies

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time. — P.D. James

The social view of humanity, namely that of social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate hierarchical relationships. It emphasizes the just demands of the oppressed in a society that wantonly exploits human beings, and it calls for their freedom. It explores the possibility or a new technology and a new sensibility, including more organic forms of reason, that will harmonize our relationship with nature instead of opposing society to the natural world. — Murray Bookchin

The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon - forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain. — John Wesley Powell

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life. — Sylvia Earle

Our neighbor and our world are the two roads out of Hell, i.e., out of pure egotism, that God has put in everyone's path to make salvation as easy as possible. Although natural lust misuses neighbors as objects rather than persons, using them rather than loving them; and although natural greed misuses things by loving them rather than using them, unnatural lust and greed are really forms of pride, which is the sin from Hell, not from the flesh or the world. In Hell there are no neighbors and no world. — Peter Kreeft

Why is The Origin of Species such a great book? First of all, because it convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: it provides a vast and well-chosen body of evidence showing that existing animals and plants cannot have been separately created in their present forms, but must have evolved from earlier forms by slow transformation. And secondly, because the theory of natural selection, which the Origin so fully and so lucidly expounds, provides a mechanism by which such transformation could and would automatically be produced. — Charles Darwin

An important tradition within westren philosophy believes in the primacy of natural science as a guide to truth. This is sometimes met with the charge that such an allegiance amounts to scientism - the view that the only things that really exist are those recognized by fundamental physical theory, and that the only forms of genuine knowledge are scientific ones. — J.J.C. Smart

[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms. — Max Porter

True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent. — Neal Stephenson

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention. — Alice Oswald

I sometimes worried that the more instinctive forms of love were not so available to you. That easy maternal devotion, for instance, that seemed so natural in some women, and which, as we spoke of from time to time, was something you had to struggle to feel. [p. 189] — Sue Miller

I honor the wisdom of life. I learn from life in all its forms. The tree teaches me. The sparrow and the wren sing my song. I am open to the lessons Life brings me from the earth. I learn from the wind, from the sun, from the small flowers, and from the stars. I walk without arrogance. I learn from all I encounter. I open my mind and heart to the guidance and love that come to me from the natural world. — Julia Cameron

If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds. This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them. — Alexander Hamilton

Everybody is satisfied, that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society; and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate. Now, to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing what is the substance of it; to take away, or at least to suspend, the rights of nature, in order to an approved system for the protection of them ... is a procedure as preposterous and absurd in argument as it is oppressive and cruel in its effect. — Edmund Burke

The [peppered-moth] experiments show the effects of predation on the survival of the dark and of the normal forms of the Peppered Moth in a clean environment and in one polluted by smoke. The experiments beautifully demonstrate natural selection
or survival of the fittest
in action, but they do not show evolution in progress, for however the population may alter in their content of light, intermediate or dark forms, all the moths remain from beginning to end Biston Betularia. — L. Harrison Matthews

Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of a priori accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness
in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When you have trust in the supreme and live with purity of heart, nature herself would express through myriad forms all around you and I am sure the same will take you where you ought to be. — Preeth Nambiar

We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms. — Mark Fisher

Nothing that remains static is truly ever alive. Nature does not abide idleness. All energy sources of the natural world and the cosmos are in a constant motion, they are in a perpetual state of fluctuation. All forms of living must make allowances for the seasons of change. The Earth itself is twirling through space, spinning on its axis analogous to a child's top. The unpredictable forces of instability brought about by a combination of motion, change, and flux propels the miraculous dynamism of existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true. — Ian McEwan

If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture? — Lewis Mumford

The desire for sexual expression is inborn and natural. The desire cannot, and should not be submerged or eliminated. But it should be given an outlet through forms of expression which enrich the body, mind, and spirit of man. — Napoleon Hill

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. — Colette Dowling

Tazmikella hated wearing clothes, and could never understand the need of humans to hide their natural forms. She always thought that level of shame and modesty to be reflective of a race that could not elevate itself above its apparent limitations, a race that insisted on subjugating itself to more powerful beings instead of standing as their own gods in proud self-determination. — R.A. Salvatore

Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man. — Charles Darwin

Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i.e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i.e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world. — Vladimir Lenin

Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for surreptitious burial of those intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist. — David Lack

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself. — Philip K. Dick

The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new concept of equality that has made modern race relations so difficult, for there we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable change of conditions can become less conspicuous. It is because equality demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are reluctant to grant each other this basic equality, take on such terribly cruel forms. — Hannah Arendt

To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up. — John Muir

Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. — Charles Darwin

Have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we can find could be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear? — John Dewey

Cursing and healing. Left Hand path and Right Hand path. Black and White. Desiring and Repelling. They are all part of the same circle. All interlocking forms of spiritual, magickal and transformational work. Human energies in the spiritual, coming into the material world through perfectly natural means. — Dacha Avelin

in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of 'tampering with natural truth — Thomas Hardy

The mountains are exceptional places for, as the natural environment is concerned, they are the concentration of the wildest possible variety of all natural phenomena and forms. They are somehow a concentration of the truth of nature or even I'd say its essence. — Wojciech Kurtyka

Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection. — Phillip E. Johnson

Remember from this very moment: always choose that which is good for you and good for others. Choose creativity. Become a blessing to existence, because that is the only way that we can persuade God to become a blessing to us. That's the only true prayer: becoming a blessing to everyone - to people, to animals, to trees, to life in all its forms. If one remains consciously alert, slowly slowly the art is learned; slowly slowly it becomes just natural. — Rajneesh

My belly button is not simply a trace of my birth, but a precious seal and a mark, a reminder of my connection with the Source of life and all life forms. — Ilchi Lee

Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and
tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society. — Peter Drucker

we bwlive that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities — Carol J. Adams

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number. — Hermann Weyl

No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms. - Variant: There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things. — Marcus Aurelius

Devotion is the essence of the path, and if we have in mind nothing but the guru and feel nothing but fervent devotion, whatever occurs is perceived as his blessing. If we simply practice with this constantly present devotion, this is prayer itself. When all thoughts are imbued with devotion to the guru, there is a natural confidence that this will take care of whatever may happen. All forms are the guru, all sounds are prayer, and all gross and subtle thoughts arise as devotion. Everything is spontaneously liberated in the absolute nature, like knots untied in the sky. — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural - so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us. — Thomas Ligotti

Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied. — Octavio Paz

I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. — Michael Faraday

Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine - that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law - cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis. — Thomas Nagel

If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees. — Robert Motherwell

An optimal diet for preventing disease is a whole-foods, plant-based diet that is naturally low in animal protein, harmful fats and refined carbohydrates. What that means in practice is little or no red meat; mostly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes and soy products in their natural forms; very few simple and refined carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour; and sufficient "good fats" such as fish oil or flax oil, seeds and nuts. A healthful diet should be low in "bad fats," meaning trans fats, saturated fats and hydrogenated fats. Finally, we need more quality and less quantity. — Anonymous

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars - even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The — Henry David Thoreau

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. — Edward W. Said

In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Because the free market system is so weak politically, the forms of capitalism that are experienced in many countries are very far from the ideal. They are a corrupted version, in which powerful interests prevent competition from playing its natural, healthy role. — Raghuram Rajan

Rocks crumble, make new forms,
oceans move the continents,
mountains rise up and down like ghosts
yet all is natural, all is change. — Anne Sexton

Thousands of years ago, man lived in harmony with the rest of the natural world. Through what we would today call Telepathy, he communicated with animals, plants, and other forms of life-none of which he considered "beneath" himself, only different, with different jobs to perform. He worked side by side with earth angels and nature spirits, with whom he shared responsibility for taking care of the world. — Benjamin Hoff

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! — Charles Darwin

(At first, it seems as if the existence of complex life forms on Earth violates the second law. It seems remarkable that out of the chaos of the early Earth emerged an incredible diversity of intricate life forms, even harboring intelligence and consciousness, lowering the amount of entropy. Some have taken this miracle to imply the hand of a benevolent creator. But remember that life is driven by the natural laws of evolution, and that total entropy still increases, because additional energy fueling life is constantly being added by the Sun. If we include the Sun and Earth, then the total entropy still increases.) — Michio Kaku

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. — Oscar Wilde

Anything that is beautiful is beautiful just as it is. Praise forms no part of its beauty, since praise makes things neither better nor worse. This applies even more to what it commonly called beautiful: natural objects, for example, or works of art. True beauty has no need of anything beyond itself. — Marcus Aurelius

Okay, fine, we were married elsetime. Anyway, we died of whatever you die from, let's say natural causes. But we were in love, so our souls keep finding each other in whatever forms our bodies take. — Cat Patrick

Intellect is the knowledge obtained by experience of names and forms; wisdom is the knowledge which manifests only from the inner being; to acquire intellect one must delve into studies, but to obtain wisdom, nothing but the flow of divine mercy is needed; it is as natural as the instinct of swimming to the fish, or of flying to the bird. Intellect is the sight which enables one to see through the external world, but the light of wisdom enables one to see through the external into the internal world. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

And the camera position, the organization, looking for repeating forms, shapes, trying to set up a visual rhythm seemed to come very natural. All of a sudden I was in a forest of aluminum and steel rather than a forest that we might think of in a traditional sense. — John Sexton

There is a spiritual capacity in carbon as there is a carbon component functioning in our highest spiritual experience. If some scientists consider that all this is merely a material process, then what they call matter, I call mind, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Possibly it is a question of terminology, since scientists too on occasion use terms that express awe and mystery. Most often, perhaps, they use the expression that some of the natural forms they encounter seem to be "telling them something." — Thomas Berry

The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens. — Jostein Gaarder

Intelligence and rationalism are not in themselves revolutionary. But technical thinking is foreign to all social traditions: the machine has no tradition. One of Karl Marx's seminal sociological discoveries is that technology is the true revolutionary principle, beside which all revolutions based on natural law are antiquated forms of recreation. A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary; but it would soon destroy itself and its technology. — Carl Schmitt

Spellwork is a form of creation. Manifesting the invisible and the imaginable into real life verifiable forms, through perfectly natural means. — Dacha Avelin

I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I've always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me to be one of the most natural and fundamental ways of human expression. After all, you begin to hear and tell stories when you're a child, and there doesn't seem to be anything very complicated about it. I suspect that most of you have been telling stories all your lives, and yet here you sit - come to find out how to do it.
Then last week, after I had written down some of these serene thoughts to use here today, my calm was shattered when I was sent seven of your manuscripts to read.
After this experience, I found myself ready to admit, if not that the short story is one of the most difficult literary forms, at least that it is more difficult for some than for others. — Flannery O'Connor

We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement. — B.F. Skinner

The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible ("whole" foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein. — T. Colin Campbell