Quotes & Sayings About What We Can Learn From Nature

Some people never seem to learn from experience. No matter how often they had seen the lion devour the lamb, they continued to cling to the hope that the nature of the beast might change. If only the lion could get to know the lamb better, they argued, or talk matters over ... — Emma Goldman

Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family. — Philippa Gregory

Learn to accept the transitory nature of existence of the body and the mind; see eternity in everything, this world, the other worlds, and nirvana. — Frederick Lenz

If we worship another, then we remain in duality. We have not fully entered the path within.

Through awareness, we learn to worship the essence of our nature and the truth of existence within the temple of our own consciousness. Our worship is a realization of truth and oneness. It is rejoicing within our being.

True worship is to fill ourselves with the awareness of eternity, to know our godliness as beings of light.

Worship no person, or image -- only the awareness of who you are becoming. — Robert S. Cosmar

Existence is governed by its own law. Here, the things impermanent by nature
are bound to meet their end. Hence, with the passage of time, not only Ravana's
Lanka but "Krishna's" Dwarka also sinks. — Deep Trivedi

What the Indians are saying is that they are recognizing the right of wilderness to be wilderness. Wilderness is not an extension of human need or of human justification. It is itself and it is inviolate, itself. This does not mean that, therefore, we become separated from it, because we don't. We stay connected if, once in our lives, we learn exactly what that connection is between our heart, our womb, our mind, and wilderness. And when each of us has her wilderness within her, we can be together in a balanced kind of way. The forever, we have that within us. — Paula Gunn Allen

The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go. — Theodore Roethke

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

We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. — Truman Capote

What we learn from the story of Adam and Eve is simple. What we can have is never what we want. And when we can have what we wanted we want something else. It's human nature in a single luminous story. Our sin. Our fall. Our problem. — R. Joseph Hoffmann

Decide.

Take one of the most unsettling things you feel exist in your life and decide.

Decide to meet it with love and understanding.
Decide to meet it with a proactive spirit that believes that a solution, an ease, a peaceful resolve rests in the meeting.

Prepare your heart for what it feels like to be joyous over the result. Give life to this solution with your breath.

Let any fear be a helpmate, let it actually support and lift you to an awareness that your next opportunity for growth is revisiting you through this present unsettling because you are now more than capable and authentically ready to meet it.

Learn and value the lesson and transcend its repetitive nature. — David Ault

Learn on how little man may live, and how small a portion nature requires. — Lucan

The beauty of nature can only have its value and meaning if it nurtures and inspires the dwellers to live and create history, arts, culture, and language so that its spirit can be told from one generation to the next. The nature is the medium from which the dwellers build their historical lives (structure), and the interconnecting story between nature and people is the final historical form, that is, as a complete historical narrative between the dwelling and the dwellers within a particular time and space in the history of our planet. (Danny Castillones Sillada, Tomorrow's conservationists what we can learn from Danjugan Island) — Danny Castillones Sillada

As the season changes, we learn to adapt. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Loneliness is simply the felt experience of our "Obediential Potency." In our loneliness, "in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,"18 we experience our nature, learn the reason why God had made us, and are pushed out of ourselves in order to move toward that end. — Ronald Rolheiser

to have a physical body and to work with it and to work with the forces of nature to mold it into the highest expression of joy, and to keep it always by using it to learn how to overcome disease, impairment and as today's cutting edge, non-funded, objective, purposeful science says, one day, even death? What if short-term excitement and intensity created by the overblown desire to win at all cost could be replaced by a more durable excitement in an intensity springing from the heart of the physical athletic experience itself? It would soon be discovered that sports and physical activities reformed and refurbished with integrity, not buy-offs are the best possible path to personal enlightenment and social transformation for this new millennium. — Don Tolman

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

What can we learn from nature? Just be patient. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

We must turn to nature itself, to the observations of the body in health and in disease to learn the truth. — Hippocrates

It is not what you think should be, but what is, that is interesting. When you have the expectation that something should be such and such a way, you will never learn what your nature wants. — Charlotte Selver

We do well to ask about the catechetical value of our songs of worship. What vision of God do they convey? Do they serve well the proclamation of the biblical Gospel? Are the doctrines they exposit or imply sound doctrines that conform to the Gospel? Are our songs biblically based, and clearly so? Have we humbled ourselves to learn from the saints who have gone before us by singing the best of the songs from of old? Or do we limit ourselves to only the newest of the new songs? How can we do a better job of seizing upon the catechetical nature and formative power of our past and present hymnody? — J.I. Packer

BLAMING IDIOTS FOR interruptions is like blaming clowns for scaring children - they can't help it. It's their nature. Then again, I had (who am I kidding - and have), on occasion, been known to create interruptions out of thin air. If you're anything like me, that makes us both occasional idiots. Learn to recognize and fight the interruption impulse. This is infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines to follow. — Timothy Ferriss

What don't I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain't nobody here saying, 'You'd better learn this.' But I still think I've got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me. — B.B. King

Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or 'improving' nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her. — Janine Benyus

We are, by nature, receivers. Even if we have a desire to learn God's Word, we still listen from a default self-centered mind-set that is always asking, What can I get out of this? — David Platt

Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilised accomplishments which we all learn, as an Art; and, more, that very capacity is rarely practised by any of us except when our minds are most indolent and most unoccupied. How much share have the attractions of Nature ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of ourselves or our friends? What space do they ever occupy in the thousand little narratives of personal experience which pass every day by word of mouth from one of us to the other? All that our minds can compass, all that our hearts can learn, can be accomplished with equal certainty, equal profit, and equal satisfaction to ourselves, in the poorest as in the richest prospect that the face of the earth can show. — Wilkie Collins

There wasn't any particular player I modeled my game after. I tried to learn from everyone and create my own style. I studied past players. Truth be told I never had a favorite player. It's just not my nature to go around idolizing people. I just go try to learn. — Magnus Carlsen

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose. — Richard Dawkins

For me it has always been easier here, where only the fundamentals count, to learn what every man must learn in this world."
"And that, my lord?"
"Enough of the meaning of life to be ready to die. — Margaret Craven

If you submit to the ocean, you drown. If you try to control the ocean, then you're deluded. You learn how to live with the ocean. You learn how to float, to swim, to be a part of it, to be with it. That is the nature of the Pagan's relationship with nature. — Emma Restall Orr

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can. — Joanna Lumley

Snow-melt in the stream: Mama Nature turning winter's storms into nourishment for the soil, fecundity, and beauty. This is what I must now learn to do with the stormy weather I've been passing through: turn it into beauty, turn it into art, so new life can germinate and bloom.
One example of a creative artist who does this is my friend Jane Yolen, who wrote her exquisite book of poems The Radiation Sonnets while her husband was undergoing treatment for the cancer that would eventually claim his life. This is what all artists must do: take whatever life gives us and "alchemize" it into our art (either directly and autobiographically, as in Jane's book, or indirectly; whatever approach works best), turning darkness into light, spinning straw into gold, transforming pain and hardship into what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'a miraculous grace. — Terri Windling

Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected ... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature. — John Naisbitt

I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. — Vandana Shiva

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw. — Alain De Botton

Disappointment over love affairs generally has the effect of driving men to drink, and women to ruin; and this, because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a constructive nature. — Napoleon Hill

I wish to be
an inspector of volcanoes.
I want to study cloud formations
and memorize the wind
and learn by heart the habits of
the ponderosa pine. — Edward Abbey

My hope is that we can navigate through this world and our lives with the grace and integrity of those who need our protection. May we have the sense of humor and liveliness of the goats; may we have the maternal instincts and protective nature of the hens and the sassiness of the roosters. May we have the gentleness and strength of the cattle, and the wisdom, humility, and serenity of the donkeys. May we appreciate the need for community as do the sheep and choose our companion as carefully as do the rabbits. May we have the faithfulness and commitment to family as the geese, and adaptability and affability of the ducks. May we have the intelligence, loyalty, and affection of the pigs and the inquisitiveness, sensitivity, and playfulness of the turkeys.
My hope is that we learn from the animals what it is we need to become better people. — Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Adoration is not some fervent spiritual or poetic exercise reserved for a chosen few. I believe the human race will die out and destroy nature if it does not learn again how to adore God, the God in all of us, God shining and living in nature, and learn again how to act from and in that spirit of adoration. — Andrew Harvey

From nature one can learn the lessons of divine providence, and some of us need to be reminded of this because we can look and not see a world alive with God's presence. — Scot McKnight

Sam held one of the mice up by its tail over the box and then hesitated. "Her, you want to have a go?"...
If Sam thought she was going to squeal at the sight of nature in the raw, he had a lot to learn.
Bella fed the owlet, cheering as he gulped down his food with a greedy intensity that bode well for the little guy's future recovery. And she grinned to herself when she heard Sam mutter under this breath. "This has got to be the weirdest first date in history. — Deborah Blake

What it means among other things is the more we learn about the nature of the universe, the nature of creation ... if we're not updating what we mean by God ... what we mean by the gospel, we're going to have outdated, misleading and actually trivial understandings of those. — Michael Dowd

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human? — Edward W. Said

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

We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest. — Lewis Thomas

[For] men to whom nothing seems great but reason ... nature ... is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living. These are the men whom we see possessed by a passion to learn ... Those are the natural scientific men; and they are the only men that have any real success in scientific research. — Charles Sanders Peirce

A human being too, is many things. Whatever makes up the air,the earth, the herbs, the stones is also part of our bodies. We must learn to be different, to feel and taste the manifold things that are us. — Lame Deer

December stillness, teach me through your trees
That loom along the west, one with the land,
The veiled evangel of your mysteries.
While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down
Deepens, and dusk embues me where I stand,
With grave diminishings of green and brown,
Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;
And let me learn your secret from the sky,
Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birds
In lone remote migration beating by.
December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,
Teach me to travel far and bear my loads. — Siegfried Sassoon

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence
but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson
that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. — Naomi Wolf

It is not your duty or responsibility to change the minds of other people. The nature of their thinking is advanced or limited by their experience. In your presence, they have an opportunity to learn about you and, perhaps, to grow. — Iyanla Vanzant