Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept.
The temperament reflects everything like a mirror![Also known as:]Human nature is a mirror, sir, the clearest mirror![Зеркало натура, зеркало-с, самое прозрачное-с!]
If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough.
Whatsoever is contrary to nature is also contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.
We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.[On peut braver les lois humaines, mais non résister aux lois naturelles.]
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more.
One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.[Die Natur war schön, wenn sie zugleich als Kunst aussah; und die Kunst kann nur schön genannt werden, wenn wir uns bewußt sind, sie sei Kunst, und sie uns doch als Natur aussieht.]
Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.
