Diane Ackerman Quotes

My philosophy? Simplicity plus variety.

I think complexity is beautiful.

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

Many things complicated by nature are restored by reason.

Keeping your lives as varied as possible is a good thing.

Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Nature expresses a design of love and truth.

Life is too complicated not to be orderly.

Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

Reality favors symmetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

In her (nature's) inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain Here earth and water seem to strive again, Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised, But, as the world, harmoniously confused: Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

We live in a very chaotic world that sometimes we - it just seems like a mess. One of the reasons why we listen to music, and to great classical music in particular, is that everything is in an order and in a place and has a beauty that you see in nature, that you see and that people look for when they look for God.

My life won't be a series of either/ors - musician or actor, rock or country, straitlaced or rebellious, this or that, yes or no. The real choices in life aren't that simple.

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.

Like in nature, I like things which are based on a few simple principles, even though their manifestation can be very rich.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.