Quotes & Sayings About Nature From Books

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood. — Pablo Casals

Appreciation, whether of nature, or books, or art, or men, depends very much on temperament. What is beauty or genius or greatness to one, is far from being so to another. — Tryon Edwards

There's a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you've come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: 'Luxury! more luxury!' But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father's expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture books. — Angela Carter

I asked of the limitless sunshine
How to shine with the dawn's glowing light;
No answer came back from the sunshine,
But my soul heard a whisper, "Burn bright! — K. Balmont

What manner of people they were only books and other people could tell ... and the tale was a long and gory one dating from the dim, conjectural dawn of history. But being human they were as apt to change as mother nature to remain constant. — Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself. — Craig Childs

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is very very dangerous for our future generations, those of us who believe that the world is not only necessary to us in its pristine state, but it is in itself an act of some kind of spiritual thing. I said once, and I think this is true, the world did not have to be beautiful to work. But it is. What does that mean?
[from 'A Thousand Mornings' With Poet Mary Oliver for NPR Books] — Mary Oliver

We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and powerfully represented than the virtues, which are opposed to them, and which are personified in the titular heroes of the respective books. The alteration which made these personified virtues the centre each of a book was probably part of the reconstruction on the basis of Aristotle Ethics.
The nature of the debt to Aristotle suggests that Spenser did not borrow directly from the Greek, but by way of modern translations. — Janet Spens

I only had two real tasks [while in Norway]: gathering dead trees to burn from the surrounding small forest and getting water from a hole in a frozen stream. The rest of the time I wandered around, obsessed over my life dramas, stared into space, read books, wrote letters, made up songs, went crazy and eventually snapped out of my misery and noticed the dawn — Phil Elverum

All boys wish to be manly; but they often try to become so by copying the vices of men rather than their virtues. They see men drinking, smoking, swearing; so these poor little fellows sedulously imitate such bad habits, thinking they are making themselves more like men. They mistake rudeness for strength, disrespect to parents for independence. They read wretched stories about boy brigands and boy detectives, and fancy themselves heroes when they break the laws, and become troublesome and mischievous. Out of such false influences the criminal classes are recruited. Many a little boy who only wishes to be manly, becomes corrupted and debased by the bad examples around him and the bad literature which he reads. The cure for this is to give him good books, show him truly noble examples from life and history, and make him understand how infinitely above this mock-manliness is the true courage which ennobles human nature. — James Clarke

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. — Mortimer J. Adler

Reason gives us tools to control nature. But it cannot indicate which uses of nature are good or humane. Reason shows us how to achieve our goals. But it cannot determine which goals are right to pursue in the first place. It ascertains what we can do, but not what we should do. What works, but not what is good. Facts, but not values. As a result, many people concluded that the only way to plumb the Big Questions was to "escape from reason" (the title of one of Schaeffer's books). That is, to leave reason behind and take a leap of faith from the lower story to the upper story. — Nancy Pearcey

I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature. — William Harvey

Out of the blending of human and animal stories comes the theme that I hope is inherent in all my books: that man is an inescapable part of all nature, that its welfare is his welfare, that to survive, he cannot continue acting and regarding himself as a spectator looking on from somewhere outside. — Fred Bodsworth

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. — Carl Sagan

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. — Denis Diderot

This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshly tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; the knowledge of which we were not taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting! — Jan Siegel

Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or main drags but at the assembly plant's gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don't see why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because you don't want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, it's because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and the destinations that I have in mind don't exist. — Joseph Brodsky

The solitary speaks.One receives as a reward for much ennui , ill-humour and boredom, such as a solitude without friends, books, duties or passions must entail, one harvests those quarters of an hour of the deepest immersion in oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the most potent refreshing draught from the deepest well of his own being. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Believe one who has tried, you shall find a fuller satisfaction in the woods than in the books. The trees and the rocks will teach you that which you cannot hear from the masters. — Bernard Of Clairvaux

Tis open before your eyes," returned the scout; "and he who knows it is not a niggard of its use. I have heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may deform his works in the settlement, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests. If any such there be, and he will follow me from sun to sun, through the windings of the forest, he shall see enough to teach him that he is a fool, and the greatest of his folly lies in striving to rise to the level of One he can never equal, be it in goodness, or be it in power. — James Fenimore Cooper

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My pessimism (which, by the way, is far from absolute) originated with my despair in the lack of perfection to be found in human nature. I was attempting in my successive books to show the inevitable handicap of the human condition. — Stanislaw Lem

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable,is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom — Samuel Smiles

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. — John Lubbock

God's story is our ontology: it explains our nature, our essence, our beginnings and our endings, our qualities, and our attributes. When we daily read our Bibles, in large chunks of whole books at a time, we daily learn that our own story began globally and ontologically. God has known us longer than anyone else has. The Bible declares that he knew us from before the foundations of the world. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

A lady must be born of unsullied blood for at least three generations, on each side of her house. Think for a minute about where you are going to fulfil that condition. Then she must be gentle by nature, and rearing. She must know all there is to learn from books, have wide experience to cover all emergencies, she must be steeped in social graces, and diplomatic by nature. She must rise unruffled to any emergency, never wound, never offend, always help and heal, she must be perfect in deportment, virtue, wifehood and motherhood. She must be graceful, pleasing and beautiful. She must have much leisure to perfect herself in learning, graces and arts - — Gene Stratton-Porter

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. — Bernard Of Clairvaux

It opens the mind toward an understanding of human
nature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the very
essence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberal
education. It is the foremost approach to humanism,
the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguish
man from other living beings ... Personal culture
is more than mere familiarity with the present
state of science, technology, and civic affairs. It is
more than acquaintance with books and paintings and
the experience of travel and of visits to museums. It is
the assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind from
the inert routine of a merely animal existence to a life
of reasoning and speculating. It is the individual's
effort to humanize himself by partaking in the tradition
of all the best that earlier generations have
bequeathed. — Ludwig Von Mises

About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism ... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings. — Chittaranjan Das

But before [William Stoner] the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. — John Williams

I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books ... It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is as though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character. Aside from that, for me it constituted something like sanity insurance. — William Brinkley

I love books the way I love nature ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split. — Andrea Dworkin

Nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency. — Bertrand Russell

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

Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not genuine; she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature; nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original; she used to repeat sounding phrases from books; she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment, but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her — Charlotte Bronte

This is an organic religion. A religion of the people from heart to heart; a faith that finds the presence of the Divine within life, and nature, and ourselves. We don't have teachers and books because we are our own teachers, and our book is the sacred book of the Earth. We believe that we can connect with the God and Goddess and hear their voices, receive their inspiration directly and take responsibility for our own actions, without the intermediary of a pope or rabbi. We have a loose set of beliefs and morals and a ritual structure that is common to all Wiccans, but there is room for creativity and deep mystical experiences. This is a faith with roots as old as the earth.
Meri Fowler — Arin Murphy-Hiscock

Let him then, who would be indeed a Christian, watch over his ways and over his heart with unceasing circumspection. Let him endeavour to learn, both from men and books, particularly from the lives of eminent Christians, what methods have been actually found most effectual for the conquest of every particular vice, and for improvement in every branch of holiness. Thus studying his own character, and observing the most secret workings of his own mind, and of our common nature; the knowledge which he will acquire of the human heart in general, and especially of his own, will be of the highest utility, in enabling him to avoid or to guard against the occasions of evil: and it will also tend, above all things, to the growth of humility, and to the maintenance of that sobriety of spirit and tenderness of conscience, which are eminently characteristic of the true Christian. — William Wilberforce

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. — George Orwell

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs. — Anton Chekhov

That was something else I owed Teddy White. I and others of my generation, who went from newspaper and magazine reporting to writing books, owed him a far greater debt of gratitude than most people realized. As much as anyone he changed the nature of nonfiction political reporting. By taking the 1960 campaign, a subject about which everyone knew the outcome, and writing a book which proved wondrously exciting to read, he had given a younger generation a marvelous example of the expanded possibilities of writing nonfiction journalism. As I worked on my own book, I remembered his example and tried to write it as a detective novel. — David Halberstam

I'm a very lazy person by nature. I have to be really engaged, and then I go straight from lazy to obsessive. I couldn't study chemistry, but I could memorize all the books for Dungeons and Dragons. It was ridiculous. The trick is to find what I like to do. — Jon Favreau

I have inherited fragrance of classic books. Drilling the wall for light, hair tied to a beam in fear of drowsing, I wrest from nature excellence in letters. — Lisa See

Among the books there were also some containing bombast. They didn't try to portray Nature as it is within and outside of man; rather, they tried to make it more beautiful, seeking to elicit certain effects. I turned away from them. If reality isn't sacred to them, how are they capable of creating something more beautiful than God's Creation? — Adalbert Stifter

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. — William Shakespeare

Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate
with the best teachers
the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. — Carl Sagan

How very seldom do you encounter in the world a man of great abilities, acquirements, experience, who will unmask his mind, unbutton his brains, and pour forth in careless and picturesque phrase all the results of his studies and observation; his knowledge of men, books, and nature. On the contrary, if a man has by any chance an original idea, he hoards it as if it were old gold; and rather avoids the subject with which he is most conversant, from fear that you may appropriate his best thoughts. — Benjamin Disraeli

Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source. — Philip Pullman

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. — Aberjhani

They met in the library searching for old Sidney Sheldon books. Her silence and calmness drew her to him. His brooding nature drew him to her. Conversations flowed like the waters of a water-fall! And every time they met their conversations sparked flames like the forest caught in a wild fire!

There was something in her eyes! Her eyes were expressive and from the first day that they met, they spoke to him a million things! He could know which night she had cried, which night she had slept peacefully and which night of hers had been spent in complete sleeplessness. He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library...

And being an obsessive man, he did things normal men did not! Like he knew the number of strands of hair that her eye-lashes had! — Avijeet Das

Let there be a child, who should,
not be taught.
Let there be a child, who should,
be refrained from books.
Let him not hear,
don't preach him, dear.
Don't let him read the quotations,
on internet and make them his passion.
Don't tell him stories of successful,
and make them his anthem.
Allow him to grow unto what,
he is to know. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Our present work sets forth mathematical principles of philosophy. For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. It is to these ends that the general propositions in books 1 and 2 are directed, while in book 3 our explanation of the system of the world illustrates these propositions. — Isaac Newton

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond recall. — P.G. Wodehouse

I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence
I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides. — Neil Peart

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book. — James Hynes

I get ideas from everywhere: movies, books, movies, nature - it comes into my brain, it sits there for a while, and it starts coming back out. — Tony DiTerlizzi

Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own. — Caroline Kennedy

Fairy tales are rife with transformation - from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself is a changeable thing, from season to season, from a sunny day to rain, from an egg to a flying bird in a matter of weeks.
(Source: "The Nature of Cinderella".) — Marie Rutkoski

Thus there are two books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all; those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other. — Thomas Browne

Jupiter's fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.
Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System. — Arthur C. Clarke

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I've conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room. — Barry Lopez

There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature. — William Hazlitt

First, the explosion of life. Then came the celebration. Such as it had been for generations and generations, as long as the eldest of the eldest could remember; as long as the record books had kept steady score. By the time the first buds were edging their green shoots from the dirt, the parade grounds had been cleared and the maypole had been pulled from its exile in the basement of the Mansion. The board had met and the Queen decided; all that was left was the wait. The wait for May. — Colin Meloy

Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. — Mortimer J. Adler

The ECK books are simply to show people how to go inside themselves, into the pureness of their heart, where they can get answers directly from the Inner Master about things of a spiritual nature, insights to help them in their life. — Harold Klemp

Things to know from books to read — Kip Koehler

It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom. — Loren Eiseley

On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time. — Rachel Gathercole

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges. — William Hazlitt

We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice. — Thomas Jefferson

Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Make each day truly new, dressing it with the blessings of heaven, bathing it in wisdom and love and putting yourself under the protection of Mother Nature. Learn from the wise, from the sacred books, but do not forget that every mountain, river, plant or tree also has something to teach. — Paulo Coelho

Reading, writing, and personal introspection will not protect us from hardship and suffering, but they might introduce us to critical thinking and expose us to what is good in humankind and beautiful in the world that we share with all of nature. Contemplative thought, especially that supplemented with reading literature and attempting to write our own replies to the echoing voices of writers whom preceded us provide us with the potentiality for change, the possibility of personal illumination that enables us to experience a heighted quality of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster