#nature

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#advantage #alternatives #always #between #bring

Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees [...] At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #philosophy #nature

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare... ↗

— Richard Yancey

#dogs #humor #mystery #philosophy #nature

Art is a harmony parallel with nature. ↗

— Paul Cezanne

#harmony #nature #parallel

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

he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism. ↗

— Thomas Frank

#nature

I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades — stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus — then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense — a worse boon than despair. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#hell #hope #suspense #nature

Uno no se debe exasperar, uno debe esperar. La exasperación es la negación de la esperanza. Es comprensible, diría que hasta es natural; sin embargo, no es aceptable porque no permite obtener los resultados que puede eventualmente producir la esperanza. ↗

— Stéphane Hessel

#nature

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#ideas #innovation #internet #nature

Silicon-based life may be impossible for one other reason: silicon bonds readily dissolve in water. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#nature