Nature & World Sayings

52 sayings found from the Early Modern era from 52 authors

I have seen many men with long beards and little brains.

— Akbar the Great Late 16th century
Nature & World

Patience means restraining one’s inclinations.

— Tokugawa Ieyasu Early 17th century
Nature & World

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of man.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762
Nature & World

The will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained.

— Rene Descartes 1649
Nature & World

But a man cannot be said to be in a state of nature, when he is in a city or commonwealth.

— Thomas Hobbes 1642
Nature & World

Nature has no end in view, and all final causes are nothing but human figments.

— Baruch Spinoza 1677
Nature & World

Nature makes no leaps.

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1704 (published 1765)
Nature & World

The human understanding from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.

— Francis Bacon 1620
Nature & World

I am a child of nature, who has been taught to think; and I will not resign my birthright for a mess of pottage.

— Mary Wollstonecraft 1793
Nature & World

Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.

— Erasmus 1500
Nature & World

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

— Blaise Pascal 1670 (posthumous)
Nature & World

The sun never sets on my anger.

— Philip II of Spain 1580s
Nature & World

Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.

— William Shakespeare c. 1603
Nature & World

The sea is a great lord, and it does not suffer the existence of any other lords.

— Suleiman the Magnificent c. 1538
Nature & World

Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.

— Cervantes 1615
Nature & World

The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, but for this appearance, would have remained hidden from us.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1833 (posthumous)
Nature & World

What if the sun be dark’ned in his sphere, And with no chearful ray salute the spring?

— John Milton 1671
Nature & World

The more years increase, the more does my hatred of human nature increase.

— Jonathan Swift 1725
Nature & World

I would rather be a tree than a man.

— Ludwig van Beethoven 1810
Nature & World

You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds.

— Thomas More 1534
Nature & World
Your Cart

Your cart is empty