Nature - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

We may brave the laws of humanity but we can't withstand the laws of Nature.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

The contrast between the dreadful scene of blood and turmoil that he had left, and the peaceful face of Nature over which he was passing, came home to his brain vividly. Here birds sang and cattle grazed; here the sun shone undimmed by the smoke of cannon, only high up in the blue and silent air long streams of vultures could be seen winging their way to the Plain of Isandhlwana.

- H. Rider Haggard, ''Black Heart and White Heart'' (1896)

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

- H. G.Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Natural phenomena are less often produced by nature and most often produced by man.

- Alfred Bester, ''The Devil's Invention'' (1950)

People have a funny habit of taking as ''natural'' whatever they are used to - but there hasn't been any ''natural'' environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Farmer in the Sky (1950)

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

- Ray Bradbury, ''And the Rock Cried Out'' (1953)

Existence required Order and there was Order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. [. . .] The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them. Along the frontier were arrayed all the forces of nature and sometimes they destroyed those who were fighting their way outward from Earth. The men of the frontier had long ago learned the bitter futility of cursing the forces that would destroy them for the forces were blind and deaf; the futility of looking to the heavens for mercy, for the stars of the galaxy swung in their long, long sweep of two hundred million years, as inexorably controlled as they by the laws that knew neither hatred nor compassion.

- Tom Godwin, ''The Cold Equations'' (1954)

A reverence for life does not require a man to respect Nature's obvious mistakes.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit - Will Travel (1958)

Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Nature is an experimenter.

- Philip Josй Farmer, ''Prometheus'' (1961)

My brothers, are we not ourselves Nature, Nature without end? Does not the rustle of her trees echo in our bones? Is our human blood less salty than the waters of the sea that carve great caverns of lime and chalk, great skeletons beneath the waves? Does not the everlasting fire of the desert burn in our hearts?

- Stanislaw Lem,Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961), translated by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose (1973)

He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things - the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns - the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

A lot of things have been said about Nature, that she's implacable, cruel, wasteful and so on. I like to think she's - reasonable. I concede that she reaches that state cruelly, at times, and wastefully and all the rest. But she has a way of coming up with the pragmatic solution, the one that works.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''If All MenWere Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?'' (1967)

Is there anything more contemptible than Nature? The scientists, the philosophers have always tried to understand Nature, while the thing to do is to destroy it!

- Stanislaw Lem, ''The Sanitorium of Dr. Vliperdius'' (1971), translated by Michael Kandel (1977)

She always professed to adore what she called Nature, but she walked as though every blade of grass were poison ivy.

- Chad Oliver, ''King of the Hill'' (1972)

What are called the laws of Nature I take as gossip.

- Bernard Wolfe, ''The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements'' (1972)

This concern, feebly called ''love of nature,'' seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

Nature was his real antagonist - the friendly enemy who never cheated, always played fair, but never failed to take advantage of the tiniest oversight or omission.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979)

There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True wisdom lies in making the right choice.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise (1979)