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Nature Quotes

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Nature Quotes

“Indeed, while Nature is wonderfully inventive of new structures, her conservatism in holding on to old ones is still more remarkable. In the ascending line of development she tries an experiment once exceedingly thorough, and then the question is solved for all time. For she always takes time enough to try the experiment exhaustively. It took ages to find how to build a spinal column or brain, but when the experiment was finished she had reason to be, and was, satisfied.”

“Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”

Source: The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations

“Only as a child's awareness and reverence for the wholeness of life are developed can his humanity to his own kind reach its full development.”

Kind Children Humanity Nature Awareness Development Reverence Wholeness

Author:Rachel Carson

“Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.”

Knows Action Nature Progress Development Curse Pauses Inaction Progress And Development

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The best places to live, work, and visit are those places that are willing to uphold their standards in the face of pressure to allow lowest common denominator development... Successful communities understand that when they say no to development that is contrary to the long-term health of their community, they will almost always get better development in its place.”

“First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

“The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.”

Humans Problem Nature Technology Human Nature Development Infirmity Development Of Technology

Book:Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms

“I hope a start at getting some oil out of the enormous Alaska field isn't indefinitely mired in a bureaucratic morass as a result of our national concern for the ecology. This concern must not be so misguided, misdirected, misused that it serves to stop economic growth, to bankrupt companies, to stifle new development, new jobs, new horizons. In fighting new pollution and stemming present pollution, exciting, sometimes costly means and methods exist and others will evolve. But blanket legislative naysaying to expanding power and energy sources is stupid, self-defeating.”

“If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

“We do not draw conclusions with our eyes, but with our reasoning powers, and if the whole of the rest of living nature proclaims with one accord from all sides the evolution of the world of organisms, we cannot assume that the process stopped short of Man. But it follows also that the factors which brought about the development of Man from his Simian ancestry must be the same as those which have brought about the whole of evolution.”

Ifs Men World Whole Eye Science Process Sides Nature Development Evolution Draws Assuming Factors Conclusion Reasoning Organisms Accord Ancestry

Author:August Weismann

“The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.”

Knows Humans Growth Nature Results Quality Failing Human Nature Revolution Development Errors Rely Rebellious Admirable French Revolution

Book:The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde

Source: The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde

“Now, in the development of our knowledge of the workings of Nature out of the tremendously complex assemblage of phenomena presented to the scientific inquirer, mathematics plays in some respects a very limited, in others a very important part. As regards the limitations, it is merely necessary to refer to the sciences connected with living matter, and to the ologies generally, to see that the facts and their connections are too indistinctly known to render mathematical analysis practicable, to say nothing of the complexity.”

“In so far as such developments utilise the natural energy running to waste, as in water power, they may be accounted as pure gain. But in so far as they consume the fuel resources of the globe they are very different. The one is like spending the interest on a legacy, and the other is like spending the legacy itself. ... [There is] a still hardly recognised coming energy problem.”

“Man is the summit, the crown of nature's development, and must comprehend everything that has preceded him, even as the fruit includes within itself all the earlier developed parts of the plant. In a word, Man must represent the whole world in miniature.”

Men World Whole Science Nature Development Plant Fruit Whole World Crowns Summit Miniatures

Book:Elements of Physiophilosophy

Source: Elements of Physiophilosophy

“Perhaps we see equations as simple because they are easily expressed in terms of mathematical notation already invented at an earlier stage of development of the science, and thus what appears to us as elegance of description really reflects the interconnectedness of Nature's laws at different levels.”

Different Law Science Term Nature Simple Levels Stage Expression Development Simplicity Mathematical Description Equations Elegance Interconnectedness Different Levels Stages Of Development

Author:Murray Gell-Mann