Quotes about Nature

Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." [...] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.

Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

The humblest painter is a true scholar and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man.

Thus, to give an obvious instance, if I have once enjoyed the cool shade of a tree, and been lulled into a deep repose by the sound of a brook running at its feet, I am sure that wherever I can find a tree and a brook, I can enjoy the same pleasure again. Hence, when I imagine these objects, I can easily form a mystic personification of the friendly power that inhabits them, Dryad or Naiad, offering its cool fountain or its tempting shade. Hence the origin of the Grecian mythology.

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMATION Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. The universe exists. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

Left to himself, natural man would never come to God.

Modern man is the Cosmic Orphan because he has killed God. And, by doing so, he has reduced himself to an accident of nature. When he asks, Why? his cry is lost in the silence of the recesses of space. When he dies, he dies without hope. Thus, in killing God, modern man has killed himself as well.

Conclusion Therefore it seems to me that of the three alternatives before us—physical necessity, chance, or design—the most plausible explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe is design. That gives us a transcendent, super-intelligent Designer of the cosmos who has fixed the values of nature's laws. Incredible! So now we have a third argument contributing to a cumulative case for the existence of God.