Natural Limits Quotes

...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.

Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.

The confidence is there, the game is there, but physically you can't fight nature sometimes. You can't do much about it.

I acknowledge freely the great power of education and social influences in developing the active powers of the mind, just as I acknowledge the effect of use in developing the muscles of the blacksmith’s arm, and no further. Let the blacksmith labour as he will, he will find that there are certain feats beyond his power that are well within the strength of a man of herculean make, even although the latter may have led a sedentary life..

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.

Man can have only a certain number of teeth, hair and ideas; there comes a time when he necessarily loses his teeth, hair and ideas.

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?

Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits - they may still be very distant - God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

Even if an ass goes travelling he'll not come home a horse

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

Though we cannot prolong the period of a commonwealth beyond the decree of heaven, or the date of its nature, any more than human life beyond the strength of the seminal virtue, yet we may manage a sickly constitution, and preserve a strong one.

As great edifices collapse of their own weight, so Heaven sets a similar limit to the growth of prosperous states.

Seems you can't outsmart Mother Nature.

In fighting nature, man can win every battle except the last. If he should win that too, he will perish, like an embryo cutting its own umbilical cord.

I have always hated flying. The idea of it is an affront to nature. People are meant to stay on the ground.

We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.

All the species recognized by Botanists came forth from the Almighty Creator's hand, and the number of these is now and always will be exactly the same, while every day new and different florists' species arise from the true species so-called by Botanists, and when they have arisen they finally revert to the original forms. Accordingly to the former have been assigned by Nature fixed limits, beyond which they cannot go: while the latter display without end the infinite sport of Nature.

The opposite of nature is impossible.