Paul Valery Quotes

The philosophers, who have inquired into the foundations of society, have all felt the necessity of going back to a state of nature; but not one of them has got there.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

The individual and society have waged a relentless and bloody battle for ages, each striving for supremacy, because each was blind to the value and importance of the other.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

Religion, Society, and Nature--these are the three struggles of man.

Nature makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings that it is doubtful whether she deserves most the name of parent or stepmother.

Everything comes from the great book of nature.

Since we are part of nature...we empathize deeply with its ways... they serve as models of how things should be.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

These are just the rules and regulations Of the birds, and the bees The earth, and the trees, Not to mention the gods, not to mention the gods.

Inequality of rights and power proceeds from the very Author of nature.

Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

The idea is quite unfounded that on entering into society we give up any natural rights.

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir.

The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.

The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.

In nature there is no such thing as waste. In nature nothing is wasted; everything is recycled.

We cannot fail in following nature.

Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side

No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.