#nature

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#cheerful #consistently #express #future #human

The mountains are great stone bells; they clang together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent slides. Billions of stars sift amont each other untouched, too distant even to be moved, heedless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#god #life #listening #mountains #nature

One day I undertook a tour through the country, and the diversity and beauties of nature I met with in this charming season, expelled every gloomy and vexatious thought. ↗

— Daniel Boone

#charming #country #day #diversity #every

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#history #human #human nature #keeps #nature

It is better to do one's own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#better #defective #does #duty #follow

Those who made and endorsed our Constitution knew man's nature, and it is to their ideas, rather than to the temptations of utopia, that we must ask that our judges adhere. ↗

— Robert Bork

#ask #constitution #endorsed #ideas #judges

Nature is not human hearted. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#human #nature

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#beauty-in-nature #science #wonder #beauty

We trifle when we assign limits to our desires, since nature hath set none. ↗

— Christian Nestell Bovee

#desires #hath #limits #nature #none

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#human #human society #into #itself #nature