Natural They Quotes

“I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning ... I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.”

— Allan Bloom

“For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness-should such a thing as happiness even obtain for human beings except as a misconception-that can compensate us for life's hurt. As a worst-case example, a pessimist might refer to the hurt caused by some natural or human-made cataclysm. To adduce a hedonic counterpart to the horrors that attach to such cataclysms would require a degree of ingenuity from an optimist, but it could be done. And the reason it could be done, the reason for the eternal stalemate between optimists and pessimists, is that no possible formula can be established to measure proportions and types of hurt and happiness in the world. If such a formula could be established, then either pessimists or optimists would have to give in to their adversaries.”

— Thomas Ligotti

“Their hands, swinging, touched lightly now and then; their nearness was as natural as the June day.”

— Elizabeth Bowen

“But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her-but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.”

— Jamaica Kincaid

“Em, we've known each other five or six years now, but two years properly, as, you know, 'friends', which isn't that long but I think I know a bit about you and I think I know what your problem is. Here it is. I think you're scared of being happy, Emma. I think you think that the natural way of things is for your life to be grim and grey and dour and to hate your job, hate where you live, not to have success or money or God forbid a boyfriend. In fact, I think I'll go further and say that I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.”

— David Nicholls

“Then I added a dash of salt, which counteracts the natural bitterness of coffee,”

— Linda Howard

“My smile wavers as I revert to my natural state of being: nervous and weird.”

— Stephanie Perkins

“Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.”

— Richard Eberhart

“I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“I really enjoy playing a sex symbol, but it's not something I feel in real life. I'm much more of a natural girl at home.”

— Becki Newton

“Craft comes into acting later rather than sooner. I was somebody who had to learn through a process - a natural actor doesn't need to.”

— Sean Penn

“I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.”

— Sonny Rollins

“We're going to do a natural birth. At first she was like, 'We should do it at home,' and I said, 'Look, either way, when you go into labor, I will be checking into a hospital ... so if you want to come along, come along.”

— Simon Helberg

“And he went on eating his marmalade as though everything were natural.”

— Daphne Du Maurier

“I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.”

— Marie Rutkoski

“Maybe it's not a lesson so much as it's a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that's left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you're lucky. If that's what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what's said to you, doing what's done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you're all alone you keep on cawing hello pretty bird at the dark.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.”

— Werner Heisenberg

“A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem - how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can't imagine any better preparation for the work I do now.”

— Jesse James Garrett

“If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.”

— Wilhelm Dilthey

“But natural to expect that the deeds of the great messenger should be just the works of the Father done in little. If he came to reveal his Father in miniature, as it were (for in these unspeakable things we can but use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest), to tone down his great voice, which, too loud for men to hear it aright, could but sound to them as an inarticulate thundering, into such a still small voice as might enter their human ears in welcome human speech,”

— George MacDonald

“I'm not a natural runner. I'm friends with Ellie Goulding, and she'll be like, 'I've just done a 10K run' and I'm like: 'Why would you do that? How do you just do that?' But I will do that. I will do it.”

— Jessie J.

“I wasn't born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained.”

— Robert Kiyosaki

“It is one of the talents of great stylists to make obsolete words cease from appearing obsolete through the way in which they introduce them in their writing. Obsolete words which under the pens of others would seem stilted or out of place, occur most naturally under theirs. This is owing to the tact & judgment of the writers who know when
& when only-the disused term can be introduced, when it is artistically agreeable or linguistically necessary; & of course then the obsolete word becomes obsolete only in name. It is recalled into existence by the natural requirements of a powerful or subtle style. It is not a corpse disinterred (as with less skillful writers) but a beautiful body awaked from a long & refreshing sleep.”

— Constantine P. Cavafy

“For kids it's natural to be competitive.”

— Daley Thompson

“There was no way to explain to this stranger how my mental illness had just gifted me with a magical moment. I realized it would have sounded a bit crazy, but that made sense. After all, I was a bit crazy. And I didn't even have to pretend to be good at it. I was a damn natural.”

— Jenny Lawson

“I'm a natural. That's why I make the big bucks.”

— Gabrielle Reece

“The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural.”

— Adam Nicolson

“I can't think of a more natural experience in my entire life than playing with Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman again. I really learned how to play with them in terms of drumming.”

— Reed Mullin

“The classic style is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this control is maintained.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

“It is commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste.”

— Germaine Greer

“Magic is natural. It is a harmonious movement of energies to create a needed change. If you wish to practice magic,
all thoughts of it being paranormal or supernatural must be forgotten.”

— Scott Cunningham

“All sudden and violent changes, whatever their causes or character, must tend to decrease the respect for status quo as a natural order of things.”

— Gunnar Myrdal

“Somebody should talk to Dan Quayle and tell him natural blondes don't have dark grey stripes on the sides.”

— Harvey Fierstein

“I was always trying to look modest and natural. I don't like women who come into the lab and you see immediately that it took them two hours to dress in the morning.”

— Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

“It has therefore been justly observed that however honestly the coin of a country may conform to its standard, money made of gold and silver is still liable to fluctuations in value, not only to accidental, and temporary, but to permanent and natural variations, in the same manner as other commodities.”

— David Ricardo

“If you have patience, then you'll also have love. Patience leads to love. If you forcefully open the petals of a bud, you won't be able to enjoy its beauty and fragrance. Only when it blossoms by following its natural course, will the beauty and fragrance of a flower unfold.”

— Mata Amritanandamayi

“It is natural for every man uninstructed to murmur at his condition, because, in the general infelicity of life, he feels his own miseries without knowing that they are common to all the rest of the species; and, therefore, though he will not be less sensible of pain by being told that others are equally tormented, he will at least be freed from the temptation of seeking, by perpetual changes, that ease which is no where to be found, and though his diseases still continue, he escapes the hazard of exasperating it by remedies.”

— Samuel Johnson

“To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
Go wiser thou! and in thy scale of sense
Weigh thy opinion against Providence.”

— Alexander Pope

“The magical approach is indeed the natural approach to life's experience. It is the adult version of childhood knowledge, the human version of the animals' knowledge, the conscious version of 'unconscious' comprehension.”

— Seth

“If you have superheroes or characters that exist in the same world, and you're doing movies of them, wouldn't it be fun to put a couple of them together in one movie? Audiences love that. It's a natural thing to do that.”

— Stan Lee

“Conoco will build a $75 million plant to see if a process to convert natural gas to liquid fuel is profitable. It has to be. In California, gasoline is so expensive that people are trying to run their cars on cocaine.”

— Argus Hamilton

“Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“To please the fancy is no trifling good, Where health is studied; for whatever moves The mind with calm delight, promotes the just And natural movements of th'harmonious frame.”

— John Armstrong

“The key choices you make-apart from the natural talent you already have-will set you apart from others who have talent alone.”

— John C. Maxwell

“I believe that every artist, in one way or another, is a wounded person. It's not natural to make art.”

— Paul Auster

“Recognize that it is natural and normal to fear rejection. The only thing wrong with it is if you allow the fear to dominate you so that it holds you back from fulfilling your potential in your business.”

— Brian Tracy

“To say a thing is natural is to condone it, never to praise it.”

— Quentin Crisp

“This relaxation is the space in which happiness grows, and again I repeat: for no reason at all. It is not that you are happy because of something. You are simply happy. Happiness is your nature. Unhappiness is something nurtured, you have learned it. Every credit goes to you for all your misery, but for happiness, you cannot have any credit. It is natural. You were born happy. You were happy in your mother's womb ...”

— Rajneesh

“The adventure of the sun is the greatest natural drama by which we live ...”

— Henry Beston