Nature & The Cosmos

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

The man who does not do yajna can win nothing in this world.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Coloured communities would like to see coloured representatives. That is not racism, that is how nature works.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

When you make the finding yourself--even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light--you never forget it.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

Viktor Frankl Man's Search for Meaning

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds

There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea

Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world ... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi.

Hannah Arendt The Human Condition

I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.

Bertrand Russell The Conquest of Happiness

Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?

Immanuel Kant Critique of Practical Reason

Let us not depend upon the world for pleasure.

Swami Vivekananda Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda

As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character, his authority should have great weight.

Cicero De Officiis & Tusculan Disputations

On Ps 60:3: “To Thee have I cried from the ends of the earth.

Augustine of Hippo Confessions

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Death, like generation, is a secret of Nature.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

Men do not stumble over mountains, but over molehills

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.

Laozi Tao Te Ching

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.

Zhuangzi Zhuangzi

If he goes forth from the household life into homelessness, then he will become an Arahant, a fully-enlightened Buddha, one who draws back the veil from the world.

Gautama Buddha Dhammapada & Sutta Pitaka