I think… the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process. – Tom Stoppard
If they’re not temperamental, I don’t want them. It’s in the nature of a great artist to be that way. – Sol Hurok
For thousands of years, we’ve insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse. – Steve Erickson
What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature – these are the only objects worth being attached to. – William Godwin
Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour. – Tom Hanks
You know, if you have a zoo you don’t want the other creatures to see you. You want them to hang out and act properly and, you know, when the monkeys will come and ask for the bananas, they won’t act like monkeys. If you want them to act on what their true nature is, you’ve got to leave them alone. – Tarsem Singh
It’s certainly a lot more difficult to get a project made if you’re talking about something progressive. That’s just the nature of the industry. – Tim Robbins
Music moves me – duh – and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how they work, emotions evoked by dint of carefully laid out thoughts, have a more lingering effect. – Yann Martel
As a means of contrast with the sublime, the grotesque is, in our view, the richest source that nature can offer. – Victor Hugo
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. – William Blake
In the country, it feels like you don’t have control over nature anymore – nature is in control of you. – Sam Trammell
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn’t really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. – Stefan Sagmeister
When I work, a lot of times I have to lose weight, and I do that, but in my regular life I was not eating right, and I was not getting enough exercise. But by the nature of my diet and that lifestyle – boom! The end result was high blood sugars that reach the levels where it becomes Type 2 diabetes. I share that with a gajillion other people. – Tom Hanks
People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living, the beauty of nature, quiet, tranquillity, peace, joy, hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast. – Thomas Kincade
Honestly, I’m not a big person in terms of religion, but I really believe in nature. I feel like anytime you see anything beautiful in nature that’s the closest I’m ever going to get to God or a sense of a higher power. – Sara Rue
I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it’s strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago. – Theo Jansen
When a fantasy turns you on, you’re obligated to God and nature to start doing it – right away. – Stewart Brand
I’ve always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it’s kind of disgraceful that there aren’t more female directors. – Susanne Bier
Religion provides us with a puritanical dream, which can never be realized because it goes against human nature. – Youssef Ziedan
The development of a rational view of the nature of catalysis was thus absolutely dependent on the creation of the concept of the rate of chemical reaction. – Wilhelm Ostwald
By the very nature of satire or parody, you have to love and respect your target and respect it enough to understand every aspect of it, so you can more effectively make fun of it. – T. J. Miller
An house is of a double nature, viz., one, wherein it is a way and means of expence, the other as it is an instrument and tool of gain. – William Petty
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common – a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature. – Steven Pinker
