Quotes
Quotes about Nature
In them Nature's copy's not eterne.
All that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
'T is a fault to Heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd.
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.
Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I 'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.
To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature.
I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
'T is not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature.
Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature.
Nature is fine in love, and where 't is fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
Nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will.
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine.
Nature's above art in that respect.
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.
My nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Thyself and thy belongings
Are not thine own so proper as to waste
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike
As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely touch'd
But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
Now, by two-headed Janus,
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.
As he said in Machiavel, omnes eodem patre nati, Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin, etc. "We are by nature all as one, all alike, if you see us naked; let us wear theirs and they our clothes, and what is the difference?"
The world's a theatre, the earth a stage
Which God and Nature do with actors fill.
