It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.[Ce qui ferait la laideur d’un jardin fait la beauté d’une montagne.]
Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.
It’s human nature to gripe, but I’m going ahead and doing the best I can.
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.
In general Mankind, since the improvement of Cookery, eat about twice as much as Nature requires.
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!
We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink.[Nous tournons le dos à la nature, nous avons honte de la beauté. Nos misérables tragédies traînent une odeur de bureau et le sang dont elles ruissellent a couleur d’encre grasse.]
We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
Water is the driver of nature.[L’acqua è ‘l vetturale della natura.]
