Pliny the Elder Quotes

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.

Nature, they call you a mother; they ought to call you a cruel stepmother.

Mother Nature is not sweet.

The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human.

Man - a being in search of meaning.

Human nature is what Heaven supplies.

Filmmakers tell stories to explore human nature, which is always a flawed thing.

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, it makes no sound.

We talk of communing with Nature but 'tis with ourselves we commune .... Nature furnishes the conditions.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

I'm not interested in showing the wish of what it looks like to be human. I'm interested in showing what it actually looks like.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Our body is part of nature. Our creations, they're not natural. We build things that aren't natural, but our bodies, they're part of that system.

It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.

No, no! I do nature injustice. She gave us inventive faculty, and set us naked, and helpless on the shore of this great ocean,--the world; swim those who can, the heavy may go to the bottom.

The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.