Natural Structures Quotes & Sayings

I don't think you can impose a social order from the top down. — David Douglas Duncan

To make possible the subjection of eternal, spiritual organized intelligences to perishable, material structures, certain natural laws would naturally be brought into operation. From the point of view of the eternal spirit, it might mean the breaking of a law directed towards eternal life; yet to secure the desired contact with matter, the spirit was compelled to violate the law. Thus, in this earth life, a man who desires to acquire a first hand acquaintance with magnetism and electricity, may subject himself to all kinds of electric shocks, that, perhaps, will affect his body injuriously; yet, for the sake of securing the experience, he may be willing to do it. Adam, the first man, so used natural laws that his eternal, spiritual body became clothed upon with an earthly body, subject to death. Then in begetting children, he was able to produce earthly bodies for the waiting spirits. According — John Andreas Widtsoe

Do we allow unlimited visitation, or do we restrict numbers to protect a delicate ecosystem? Do we heavily advertise the park, enticing paying visitors, generating needed money for Idaho's park department, or do we sacrifice financial benefits to better preserve natural ones? Do we log diseased trees, interfering with nature, or do we allow trees to rot and fall, possibly endangering lives? Do we inexpensively repair historic structures, or do we meticulously restore them? Do we maintain this park as closely as possible to the condition in which Idaho received it, or do we develop it for multiple uses; allow overnight visitors; permit all-terrain vehicles; provide paths for those unable to navigate unpaved trails? — Mary E. Reed

Spiritual maturing is about releasing people to be whoever they are - even if you don't approve or like it. — Jacob Glass

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

For nine months I grew a human being inside my belly and then I pushed it out my vagina and now I'm feeding it with my boob. Biology is so fucking weird. — Heather B. Armstrong

It's wrong to take even those occasional long sentences in the Quixote with loose structures, and subdivide, tighten and correct them because they are not instances of stylistic carelessness but examples of Cervantes's masterly creation of realistic dialogue: His amused observation of the deleterious effects of natural verbosity, or of passionate interest in the subject under discussion, on the speaker's grammar. — John Rutherford

We repeat like a religious mantra the unquestioned benefits and power of science, information and economics, without inspecting the structures and methodology on which they are built. Many of these beliefs are insupportable and dangerous. For example, the notion that human beings are so clever that we can use science and technology to escape the restrictions of the natural world is a fantasy that cannot be fulfilled. Yet it underlies much of government's and industry's rhetoric and programs. — David Suzuki

It is not the organs - that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts - that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

The cultivation of Human Values alone is Education. — Sathya Sai Baba

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine. — Francois Jacob

I believe in the battle-whether it's the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle. — Richard M. Nixon

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have. — Stephen Jay Gould

The male-dominated systems know they cannot maintain their current power structures if and when the woman is restored to her natural and powerful state as a great leader and co-creator. — Bryant McGill

If one examines the American idea of freedom, the individual, free enterprise, their Constitution, their political and economic structures as well as their mode of exploiting their natural resources, all these are shrouded in the idea of justice. — Ndabaningi Sithole

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

Under the dark evening sky, the skyscrapers seemed to become gigantic natural monoliths, and all the super-sized structures that so dominated the city, that so marked Coruscant as a monument to the ingenuity of the reasoning species, seemed somehow the mark of folly, of futile pride striving against the vastness and majesty beyond the grasp of any mortal. — R.A. Salvatore

In using the present in order to reveal the past, we assume that the forces in the world are essentially the same through all time; for these forces are based on the very nature of matter, and could not have changed. The ocean has always had its waves, and those waves have always acted in the same manner. Running water on the land has ever had the same power of wear and transportation and mathematical value to its force. The laws of chemistry, heat, electricity, and mechanics have been the same through time. The plan of living structures has been fundamentally one, for the whole series belongs to one system, as much almost as the parts of an animal to the one body; and the relations of life to light and heat, and to the atmosphere, have ever been the same as now. — James Dwight Dana

I avoid Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and if I need to communicate with someone, I email direct. — Martin Parr

We need to emphasize that what the Spirit speaks he speaks through what has already been spoken, and that what the Spirit does he does through what has already been done. — John R.W. Stott

I kept asking God for help, and after a while I realized something
that Josh was not enjoying this either. He was just trying to take care of himself, and I made the radical decision to let him off the hook. — Anne Lamott

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations ... . This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures ... . It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. — Christian Smith

Adam Smith's was a real universalism in intent. Laissez Faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation ... But the "children of darkness" were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the "ideology" of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power. — Reinhold Niebuhr

I've always been amazed at the vastness of America itself and what it does and how it does it. I'm interested in the mechanics of what makes this country happen, the power structures, the natural splendor. — Michael Light

Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments ... Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area. — Bill Mollison

Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change
a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place. — Marshall McLuhan

The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges. — Nicholas A. Christakis

When people unfortunately use religion to facilitate their envy, arrogance and hate, communalism surfaces. — Radhanath Swami

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts. — Jacques Monod

I was pillaging a lot of music that had nothing to do with guitar playing, using a lot of strange tunings and voicings and chord structures that aren't really that natural to the guitar; I ended up developing a harmonic palette that's not particularly natural to the guitar because I was always trying to make my guitar sound like something else. — Daniel Rossen

We see an ever-increasing move toward inter and trans- disciplinary attacks upon problems in the real world ... The system scientist has a central role to play in this new order, and that role is to first of all understand ways and means of how to encode the natural world into "good" formal structures. — John L. Casti

Dear God, I praise you for turning my seeds of hope into a fantastic harvest of blessings. Help me tell others of your excellent gifts. Amen. — Bethany House Publishers

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced ... building it around the natural breath structures of speech. — Kenneth Rexroth

NVC is language, thoughts, communication skills and means of influence that serve my desire to do three things: 1) to liberate myself from cultural learning that is in conflict with how I want to live my life. 2) to empower myself to connect with myself and others in a way that makes compassionate giving natural. 3) to empower myself to create structures that support compassionate giving. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

And in front of it all are the pearly gates: the proverbial entrance to Heaven that she, in earthly life, thought might not exist. But they are real, not myth or fantasy.
As she passes through them, several people greet her. In foreign tongues even, but she understands. Language no longer matter. There are no barriers between herself and others, just love.
The gorgeous views seem to go on forever. Ornate structures, mansions, banquet halls, and natural beauty, orchards, gardens. People congregate around huge marble fountains. In the distance are snow-capped mountains of the purist white. She can hear the sounds of rushing rivers and the surf of the ocean at once.
Everyone around her is happy, loving, thankful. A choir sings songs of joy and peace while others play musical instruments of every kind in perfect harmony. Children laugh and play in the streets as well as in the clouds above her head. — Victoria Kahler

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together. — Charles A. Reich

I sense in his style an indefeasible core of Protestant certainties, the certainties of a simple, unchanging, entrenched ethic that knows how to distinguish, unarguably, between Right and Wrong, Natural and Unnatural, High and Low, Black and White, with a committed force, an ethic on which his ramified and seemingly conciliatory structures of argument are invisibly based — Jocelyn Gibb

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. — Howard Pattee

When it's one animal, you really do have a tougher time because you've gotta commit to story structures that maybe are difficult to find the range in the animal to tell those stories. There are only so many things they do, if they're living in the natural world, that we can appreciate. There are plenty of things that they do that we don't appreciate. — David Douglas