#philosophy

This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#philosophy #society #nature

Of course, he said, he who is of a certain nature, is like those who are of a certain nature; he who is not, not. ↗

— Plato

#philosophy #truth #nature

‎'I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#nature #philosophy #love

The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this! ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#philosophy #wildlife #nature

The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, — a vital spot on the lake's surface, — laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg, for our amusement. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#philosophy #wildlife #nature

...the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions. ↗

— Heinrich Hertz

#nature

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#nature

Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner. ↗

— Christof Koch

#nature

The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. ↗

— John Rawls

#distribution #justice #philosophy #society #nature

Independence is like a flower that nurtures itself in the light of another. ↗

— Zephyr A. McIntyre

#personal-growth #philosophy #nature