A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.

—The Bible

Nature is the art of God.

—Thomas Browne, 1635

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

—Basho, c. 1690

If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988

We never are definitely right; we can only be sure we are wrong.

—Richard P. Feynman, 1965

Men argue, nature acts.

—Voltaire, 1764

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819

Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

—George Eliot, 1857

Drive out nature with a pitchfork, and she will always come back. 

—Horace, c. 25 BC

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

—Ronald Reagan, 1965

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1790

I always think of nature as a great spectacle, somewhat resembling the opera.

—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

Nature is immovable.

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

Nature never breaks her own laws.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500

Nature’s rules have no exceptions.

—Herbert Spencer, 1851

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.

—Chinese proverb

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

—Martin Luther

Those things are better which are perfected by nature than those which are finished by art.

—Cicero, c. 45 BC

Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.

—Lucretius, c. 57 BC

A garden must be looked into, and dressed as the body.

—George Herbert, 1640