Nature

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic. – Barack Obama

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them. – Epictetus

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear. – Marcus Aurelius

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. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart. – Charles Dickens

Water is the driving force of all nature. – Leonardo da Vinci

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. – Erich Fromm

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered. – Robert Louis Stevenson

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. – Aldous Huxley

According to the law of nature it is only fair that no one should become richer through damages and injuries suffered by another. – Marcus Tullius Cicero

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. – Alexander Hamilton

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice. – Henry Ward Beecher

There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism. – Alexander Hamilton

To feel much for others and little for ourselves to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature. – Adam Smith

There are a lot of conservative people, a lot of moderate people, Republicans, Democrats, in Hollywood. It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it. – Clint Eastwood

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. – William James

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous. – Leonardo da Vinci

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? – Henry Ward Beecher

A happy life is one which is in accordance with its own nature. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca