Man's place in Nature, or his position among the Kingdoms, is to be decided by the characteristic functions habitually discharged by him. Now, when the habits of certain individuals are closely observed, when the total effect of their life and work, with regard to the community, is gauged, . . . there ought to be no difficulty in deciding whether they are living for the Organic or for the Spiritual; in plainer language, for the world or for God. Natural Law, p. 391.
Good-sense and good-nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise.
For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.
He who can enjoy the intimacy of the great, and on no occasion disgust them by familiarity or disgrace them by servility, proves that he is as perfect a gentleman by nature as his companions are by rank.
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
I care not, Fortune, what you me deny: You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace, You cannot shut the windows of the sky Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living stream, at eve: Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave: Of fancy, reason, virtue, naught can me bereave.
O human folly! dost thou not perceive that thou hast been with thyself all thy life, and thou art not yet aware of the thing which more fully than any other thing thou dost possess, namely, thy own folly? And thou desirest with the multitude of sophists to deceive thyself and others, despising the mathematical sciences in which truth dwells and the knowledge of the things which they contain; and then thou dost busy thyself with miracles, and writest that thou hast attained to the knowledge of those things which the human mind cannot comprehend, which cannot be proved by any instance in nature, and thou deemest that thou hast wrought a miracle in spoiling the work of some speculative mind; and thou perceivest not that thy error is the same as that of a man who strips a plant of the ornament of its branches covered with leaves, mingled with fragrant flowers and fruits. Just as Justinius did when he abridged the stories written by Trogus Pompeius, who had written elaborately the noble deeds of his forefathers, which were full of wonderful beauties of style; and thus {19} he composed a barren work, worthy only of the impatient spirits who deem that they are wasting the time which they might usefully employ in studying the works of nature and mortal affairs. But let such men remain in company with the beasts; let dogs and other animals full of rapine be their courtiers, and let them be accompanied with these running ever at their heels! and let the harmless animals follow, which in the season of the snows come to the houses begging alms as from their master.
To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
In the order of intelligible things our intelligence holds the same position as our body holds in the vast extent of nature.
Talent for literature, thou hast such a talent? Believe it not, be slow to believe it! To speak or to write, Nature did not peremptorily order thee; but to work she did.
~Republic.~--Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments.--_Walpole._
Good-nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty.
A man who feels that his religion is a slavery has not began to comprehend the real nature of it.
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature. [ The Rights of the Colonists , 1772.]
Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite, are yet so contrived by nature as to be constant companions.
Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.
Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.
It is a fair and holy office to be a prophet of Nature.
The great man has more of human nature than other men organised in him.
Good-nature and good sense are usually companions.
In Nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.
Education is only second to nature.
Terrible penalty, with the ass-ears or without them, inevitable as death, written for ever in heaven, against all who, like Midas, misjudge the inner and the upper melodies, and prefer gold to goodness, desire to duty, falsehood to fact, wild nature to God, and a sensual piping Pan to a high-souled, wise-hearted, and spirit-breathing Apollo.
The demonic is that which cannot be explained by reason or understanding, which is not in one's nature, yet to which it is subject.
It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature's God; that is, he follows God in his works and in his word.
The entire dependence of the soul upon God is not an exceptional mystery, nor is man's helplessness an arbitrary and unprecedented phenomenon. It is the law of all Nature. The spiritual man is not taxed beyond the natural. He is not purposely handicapped by singular limitations or unusual incapacities. God has not designedly made the religious life as hard as possible. The arrangements for the spiritual life are the same as for the natural life. When, in their hours of unbelief, men challenge their Creator for placing the obstacle of human frailty in the way of their highest development, their protest is against the order of Nature. Natural Law, p. 269.
"Fools rush where Angels fear to tread!" Angels and Fools have equal claim To do what Nature bids them do, sans hope of praise, sans fear of blame!
All that is harmony for thee, O Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for thee is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature. All things come of thee, have their being in thee, and return to thee.
Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
Nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage, / But music for the time doth change its nature.
But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.
The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.
All things happen by necessity; in Nature there is neither good nor bad.
Every individual nature has its own beauty.
There are no fixtures in Nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.
To see her is to love her, And love but her forever; For Nature made her what she is, And never made anither!
We can now repeat the words which have been settled for us centuries ago, and which we have learnt by heart in our childhood--I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth--with the conviction that they express, not only the faith of the apostles, or of oecumenical councils, but that they contain the Confession of Faith of the whole world, expressed in different ways, conveyed in thousands of languages, but always embodying the same fundamental truth. I call it fundamental, because it is founded, in the very nature of our mind, our reason, and our language, on a simple and ineradicable conviction that where there are acts there must be agents, and in the end one Prime Agent, whom man may know, not indeed in His own inscrutable essence, yet in His acts, as revealed in Nature.
Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
Man is the favourite= (_Gunstling_) =of Nature, not in the sense that Nature has done everything for him, but that she has given him the power of doing everything for himself=.
I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law, / Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Of what I call God, And fools call Nature.
The science which alone is contrary to common sense and human nature, is that alone which has always subsisted among men.
Since the eye is the window of the soul, the soul is always fearful of losing it, so much so that if a man is suddenly frightened by the motion or an object before him, he does not with his hands protect his heart, the source of all life; nor his head, where dwells the lord of the senses; nor the organs of hearing, smell and taste. But as soon as he feels fright it does not suffice him to close the lids of his eyes, keeping them shut with all his might, but he instantly turns in the opposite direction; and still not feeling secure he covers his eyes with one hand, stretching out the {21} other to ward off the danger in the direction in which he suspects it to lie. Nature again has ordained that the eye of man shall close of itself, so that remaining during his sleep without protection it shall suffer no hurt.
One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is, that nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass in place of a lion.--_Thomas Paine._
They who pretend most to universal benevolence are either deceivers or dupes--men who desire to cover their private ill-nature by a pretended regard for all.
All things may prove fatal to us, even those made to serve us, as in nature walls may kill us and stairs may kill us, if we walk not aright.
So wonderful is human nature, and its varied ties / Are so involved and complicate, that none / May hope to keep his inward spirit pure, / And walk without perplexity through life.
And smale foules maken melodie, That slepen alle night with open eye, So priketh hem nature in hir corages; Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.
Industrial Capitalism may be defined as the corruption of a system which has always been admitted by European men — the system of private property. It has flourished under the protection which law and custom have extended to private property in essence, yet it has degraded property, allowing the swallowing up of the small man by the big one and the concentration of control in few and unworthy hands. Nevertheless, from the idea of private property did it spring, and by the remaining sanctity of private property is it protected. So also is it with that accompaniment of private property as an institution, the freedom of the family and the individual; freedom to make contracts and decide upon one’s own activities. The great proletarian body of working men, now in such violent protest against the capitalist system, owe their existence to such freedom — though by the very exercise of that freedom they have largely lost it. They were free to accept such and such wages, or to refuse them; to drive their own bargain; in practice this has reduced them to the half-slavery we see around us. But freedom is still our social theory — and by its very operation we are creating those great monopolies which are the negation of freedom. Most men who protest against modern capitalism would still preserve property and freedom. Some, more clear-sighted than the rest, demand reforms which shall re-establish the old freedom and the old well-divided property among men and undo the evils of modern capitalism by returning to what were always the first principles of our civilization. But there is another spirit abroad which would undo the evils of capitalism by destroying the right to property and by destroying freedom. It would vest control in the officers of the State, reducing all men to a common slavery for the advantage of equal distribution and for ending the existing injustice. That demand, growing in volume, successfully rooted at last in one great state — Russia — made openly by small well-organized minorities on every side, threatens the very nature of our society: and against the Communist and his ideal society is now at war. [ Cranmer: Archbishop of Canterbury 1533 – 1556 . Philadelphia & London: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931, pp. 58-59.]
We hear constantly of what Nature is doing, but we rarely hear of what man is thinking. We want ideas, and we get more facts.
The good nature of the dog is not discouraged, although it often brings upon him only rebuffs; the abusive treatment of man never offends him, because he loves man.
Bonhomie=--Good nature.
It was, after all, the Jew who, in the great history of the world, was destined to solve the riddle of the Divine in man. It was the soil of Jewish thought that in the end gave birth to the true conception of the relation between the Divine in nature and the Divine in man.
Mollissima corda / Humano generi dare se natura fatetur, / Qu? lachrymas dedit: h?c nostri pars optima sensus=--Nature confesses that she gives the tenderest of hearts to the human race when she gave them tears. This is the best part of our sensations.
Novi ingenium mulierum, / Nolunt ubi velis, ubi nolis cupiunt ultro=--I know the nature of women: when you will, they won't; when you won't, they will.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Men are content to be brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see enlarged and glorified.
Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts; but, being in its nature conventional, it loves what is conventional.
The Life of the senses, high and low, may perfect itself in Nature. Even the Life of thought may find a large complement in surrounding things. But the higher thought, and the conscience, and the religious Life, can only perfect themselves in God. Natural Law, p. 283.
If people would only define what they mean by knowing, they would shrink from the very idea that God can ever be known by us in the same sense in which everything else is known, or that with regard to Him we could ever be anything but Agnostics. All human knowledge begins with the senses, and goes on from sensations to percepts, from percepts to concepts and names. And yet the same people who insist that they know God, will declare in the same breath that no one can see God and live. Let us only define the meaning of knowing, and keep the different senses in which this word has been used carefully apart, and I doubt whether any one would venture to say that, in the true sense of the word, he is not an Agnostic as regards the true nature of God. This silence before a nameless Being does not exclude a true belief in God, nor devotion, nor love of a Being beyond our senses, beyond our understanding, beyond our reason, and therefore beyond all names.
One little weakness, we are apt to fancy, all men must be allowed, and we even claim a certain indulgence for that apparent necessity of nature which we call our besetting sin. Yet to break with the lower environment at all, to many, is to break at this single point. Natural Law, p. 186.
Love is omnipresent in nature as motive and reward.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon found out.
We never see anything isolated in Nature, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it.
It is a common law of Nature, which no time will ever change, that superiors shall rule their inferiors.
Economic conditions of this kind have occasioned popular doubt as to whether, under present circumstances, a principle of economic and social life, firmly enunciated and defended by our predecessors, has lost its force or is to be regarded as of lesser moment; namely, the principle whereby it is established that men have from nature a right of privately owning goods, including those of a productive kind. Such a doubt has no foundation. For the right of private property, including that pertaining to goods devoted to productive enterprises, is permanently valid. [ Mater et Magistra, Op. cit., §§108—109, 1961.]
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
His life was gentle, and the elements / So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up, / And say to all the world: This was a man!
He must not see nothing whatever, nor must he see so much as to believe he possesses it, but he must see enough to know that he has lost it; for to be aware of loss he must see and not see, and that is precisely the state in which he is by nature.
It is a "law of nature," verifiable by everyday experience, that our already formed convictions, our strong desires, our intent occupation with particular ideas, modify our mental operations to a most marvellous extent, and produce enduring changes in the direction and in the intensity of our intellectual and moral activities.
Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions.
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it. To do this effectually, it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events.
The laws of nature never vary; in their application they never hesitate, nor are wanting.
Whoever aims at doing or enjoying all and everything with his entire nature, whoever tries to link together all that is without him by such a species of enjoyment will only lose his time in efforts that can never be successful.
What then shall man do in such a state? Shall he doubt of all, doubt whether he wake, whether you pinch him, or burn him, doubt whether he doubts, doubt whether he is? We cannot go so far as that, and I therefore state as a fact that there never has been a perfect finished sceptic; nature upholds the weakness of reason, and prevents its wandering to such a point.
It is not metre, but metre-making agreement that makes a poem, a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architect of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
Given man, such as he is, and given the world, such as it is, a belief in divine beings, and, at last, in one Divine Being, is not only a universal, but an inevitable fact.... If from the standpoint of human reason no flaw can be pointed out in the intellectual process which led to the admission of something within, behind, or beyond nature, call it the Infinite or any other name you like, it follows that the history of that process is really, at the same time, the best proof of the legitimacy and truth of the conclusions to which it has led.
Painting has a wider intellectual range and is more wonderful and greater as regards its artistic resources than sculpture, because the painter is by necessity constrained to amalgamate his mind with the very mind of nature and to be the interpreter between nature and art, making with art a commentary on the causes of nature's manifestations which are the inevitable result of its laws; and showing in what way the likenesses of objects which surround the eye correspond with the true images of the pupil of the eye, and showing among objects of equal size which of them will appear more or less dark, or more or less clear; and among objects equally low which of them will appear more or less low; or among those of the same height which of them will appear more or less high; or among objects of equal size {99} placed at various distances one from the other, why some will appear more clearly than others. And this art embraces and comprehends within itself all visible things, which sculpture in its poverty cannot do: that is, the colours of all objects and their gradations; it represents transparent objects, and the sculptor will show thee natural objects without the painter's devices; the painter will show thee various distances with the gradations of colour producing interposition of the air between the objects and the eye; he will show thee the mists through which the character of objects is with difficulty descried; the rains which clouded mountains and valleys bring with them; the dust which is inherent to and follows the contention between these forces; the rivers which are great or small in volume; the fishes disporting themselves on the surface or at the bottom of these waters; the polished pebbles of various colours which are collected on the washed sands at bottom of rivers surrounded by floating plants beneath the surface of the water; the stars at diverse heights above us; and in the same manner other innumerable effects to which sculpture cannot attain.
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
We cannot conceive the glorious state of Adam, nor the nature of his sin, nor the transmission of it to us. These things took place under the conditions of a nature quite different to our own, transcending our present capacity.
Let us look for the influence of Environment on the spiritual nature of him who has opened correspondence with God. Reaching out his eager and quickened faculties to the spiritual world around him, shall he not become spiritual? In vital contact with Holiness, shall he not become holy? Breathing now an atmosphere of ineffable Purity, shall he miss becoming pure? Walking with God from day to day, shall he fail to be taught of God? Natural Law, Eternal Life, p. 242.
Studies perfect nature, and are perfected by experience.