Nature's Purpose Quotes

When Nature gives a young man no other utilizable faculty, she must be understood as intending him for a soldier.

The All-Wise Maker attaches hundreds of instances of wisdom to each of the beings in the palace of the universe and equips them to perform hundreds of duties. To all trees He bestows instances of wisdom to the number of its fruits and gives duties to the number of its flowers.

All nature's creatures join to express nature's purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself.

Usually we trust that nature has a master plan. But what was it she expected us to do with tobacco?.

Now, as God the maker play'd he taught the game to Nature whom he created in his image; taught her the selfsame game which he played to her.

Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If Nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.

The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.

The miller imagines that the corn grows only to make his mill turn.

Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Nature never makes any blunders, when she makes a fool she means it.

There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art.

What is there in places empty of matter? and Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate toward one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? and Whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? and Whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentrick, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very excentrick? and What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another?

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

Natura nihil agit frustra [Nature does nothing in vain] is the only indisputible axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesques in nature; not any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unncecessary spaces.

If the omniscient author of nature knew that the study of his works tends to make men disbelieve his Being or Attributes, he would not have given them so many invitations to study and contemplate Nature.

Nature, the handmaid of God Almighty, does nothing but with good advice, if we make research into the true reason of things.

Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else in which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly nature seeks, hunts, tries to ferret out the track on which God may be found.