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1 " We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms. "
2 " Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169). "
― Franco "Bifo" Berardi
3 " During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A red rose may be natural, but when I am given one by the person I love, I experience a range of emotions, memories and associations which endow that rose with symbolic significance and make it, in some sense, supernatural. It transcends its natural biological functions to communicate something in the realms of beauty, hope and love. "
4 " At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, " completes what nature left unfinished. "
5 " It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself. "
― Elena Ferrante , The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #4)
6 " The doctor if he forgets he is only the assistant to nature and zealously takes over the stage may so add to what nature is already doing well that he actually throws the patient into shock by the vigour he adds to nature's forces. "
7 " Never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed. "
8 " Whatever you are by nature keep to it never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed be anything else and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing. "
9 " We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. "
10 " What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it. "
― Isaac Bashevis Singer
11 " Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed. "
― Sydney Smith
