#natur

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#machine #nature #nature

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel. ↗

— Ivan Turgenev

#nature #nature

Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist ↗

— Philippe Lejeune

#repression #nature

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined. ↗

— Charles Nodier

#fantastic #fantasy #genre #horror #supernatural

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light! ↗

— Iain Banks

#human-nature #observation #science-fiction #art

Nature is woman's best friend,' she [Yasmina] often said. 'If you're having troubles, you just swim in the water, stretch out in a field, or look up at the stars. That's how a woman cures her fears'. ↗

— Fatema Mernissi

#women #dreams

The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or…ideologies…all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#tao #nature

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams

This I think I have learned: where there is love, the form does not matter, and the gods are pleased. This I have observed: what occurs in nature, comes by the hand of nature, and if the gods did not approve, it would not be there ~ Moondance k'Treva (Magic's Pawn) ↗

— Mercedes Lackey

#love #nature #life

I got swirling eyes and the capacity to shatter windows with my bare voice. Tod got teleportation and invisibility. The supernatural world is so far from fair. ↗

— Rachel Vincent

#supernatural #supernatural