No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people. – William Howard Taft

[H]e ran, he stopped—he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring. – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,

Nature is not benevolent: with ruthless indifference she makes all things serve their purposes… – Laozi, as quoted in The Wisdom of the East: The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ, transla