Naturalism Quotes

“On suffoquait, les chevelures s'alourdissaient sur les têtes en sueur. Depuis trois heures qu'on était là, les haleines avaient chauffé l'air d'une odeur humaine. Dans le flamboiement du gaz, les poussières en suspension s'épaississaient, immobiles au-dessous du lustre. La salle entière vacillait, glissait à un vertige, lasse et excitée, prise de ces désirs ensommeillés de minuit qui balbutient au fond des alcôves. Et Nana, en face de ce public pâmé, de ces quinze cents personnes entassées, noyées dans l'affaissement et le détraquement nerveux d'une fin de spectacle, restait victorieuse avec sa chair de marbre, son sexe assez fort pour détruire tout ce monde et n'en être pas entamé.”
― Émile Zola, Nana

“What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It's tempting to call it altruism, but it's not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.
It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness" - estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

“Mother Nature created God as a neurological anti-depressant sentiment, but Man tore that God apart into pieces and made citadels of differentiation out of them.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Krishna Cancer

“We biologists often use the phrase “Mother Nature” to refer to the entire system of Nature that we see around us, but it is not really an entity, and it does not have any real concern for any of its living creatures – it lives on with or without us; it is in our human psychology to impose a human-like identity upon any grand system that we encounter around us – it gives us a sense of closeness to that system and makes us feel an essential part of it. When I say, Mother Nature designed us, or programmed us, I am simply referring to the process of natural selection.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Wise Mating: A Treatise on Monogamy

“It is better to be foolish than a dilettante.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas

“There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

“Humans are a terrestrial species biased toward attributing the forces we see around us to familiar forces on land. But the more we look, the more we learn that everything arises from the sea and everything falls away to the sea, and the deep blue home is home to every one of us, whether we are beings of water, air, rock, ice, or soil.”
― Julia Whitty, Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean

“In the world of wild naturalism, there is nothing greater or higher than mortal survival tactics. Everything we do, we do as mortal beings with an unknowable date of death stuck on our head, or to be specific in the genetic clock.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human

“As we work to know the life that surrounds us, we stand in a lineage of naturalists — past, present, and even future. We join the" cloud of witnesses "who refuse to let the more-than-human world pass unnoticed.”
― Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

“Beauty and ugliness do not exist in nature. It's the humans who created these concepts to measure the appeal of an organic or non-organic object to themselves.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.”
― William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons

“Life is a natural phenomenon – and by mystifying it, one only disgraces its natural beauty.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas

“When you don’t have explanation for a certain phenomenon, as a real human, you should suspend judgement, instead of concocting supernatural explanations out of ignorance and primordial fanaticism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas

“The Human Self is the only friend and savior to all humanity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Buddha: The First Sapiens

“In front of the unfathomable vastness of the universe, we humans are insignificant particles of protoplasmic substance. But that’s precisely what makes us humans – we make sense out of chaos, and in that sense we produce meaningfulness. And we then pour that meaningfulness in our lives, which then outpours into the world. Thus, we provide meaning to a meaningless world – we provide meaning to a meaningless universe.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Saint of The Sapiens

“in my dreams
i need not to die everyday
to be free”
― Roseville Nidea

“every single explanation that your brain concocts about a certain phenomenon on earth, is merely a virtual hunch of the neurons. Now, when your brain has access to more information, the resulting hunch would be more accurate, than another person who has less access.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Principia Humanitas

“This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light.”
― John Hay, The Bird of Light

“That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house.”
― John Hanson Mitchell, Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

“God is nature’s anti-dote to misery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, I Am The Thread: My Mission

“Naturalism is the least subjective reality in this human world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human

“Intuition must be taken seriously in the absence of substantial theoretical understanding, but once such theoretical understanding begins to take shape, prior intuitive judgments carry little weight unless they have been endorsed by the progress of theory. The greater one's theoretical understanding, the less weight one may assign to untutored judgment.

All this applies equally well to the case of appeals to intuition in philosophy. We sometimes hear philosophers speak of some intuitions as 'merely' driven by theory, and thus to be ignored. While it is certainly true that judgments driven by bad theories are not to be taken seriously, the solution is not to try to return to some pure state of theory independent judgment, before the fall, as it were; rather the solution is to get a better theory. Intuition in the absence of theory does not count for nothing, especially if no credible theory is available. But this is not to award high marks to intuitive judgment before the arrival of successful theory, let alone after, when the initially low value of such judgment drops still lower.”
― Hilary Kornblith, Knowledge and Its Place in Nature

“Perhaps the most tragic feature of our age is that just when we have developed a truly universal perspective from which to appreciate the vastness of the cosmos, the causal complexity of material processes, and the chemical machinery of life, we have at the same time conceived the realm of value as radically alienated from this seemingly complete understanding of the fabric of existence.”
― Terrence Deacon

“All courage and help are already vested in your amazing web of neurons by Mother Nature.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Let The Poor Be Your God

“We must stand on the side of goodness, compassion and conscience, not to keep the processes in Nature functioning, but because if we don't, the environment that we would be giving our future generations, would be no different than the violent and lethal environment of the wild.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Saint of The Sapiens

“What is life - life is not merely the functional expression of protoplasmic substance - it is the functional expression of protoplasmic substance that holds unimaginable potential for growth and progress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

“There never was any separate and supernatural trinity - it has always been the human mind playing the triangle.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine

“Essentially that which is only matter, and the sciences that can, through verifiable methods, explore that which we know exists, through the means of...you know, touching, tasting, seeing, and so on...as well as using other instrumentation and so on...is very useful. The question winds up being: ultimately one of: 'Is that all there is?' And going and saying there wasn't even an understanding of matter as we understand it today prior to [...] about the time of Descartes...um, I don't know if the historical argument's the best one to make in that case. But one thing I can say is that thinking that all that exists is that which we can perceive with the five senses isin no way provable–and then if we talk about, 'Well, what is the essence of something?', then we run into a whole other mess.

But if we're talking in the context of modernism, where people have gone and become wholly materialistic, the answers become incredibly simple. Incredibly simplistic. And ultimately, I'm not convinced of their accuracy; not only am I not convincedof their accuracy,but I'm not convinced that it's good for humankind in general: because ultimately we're going to wind up killing ourselves off, if all we believe in is that which is material.”
― Matthew Laine

“La ciencia es contraria a la sensibilidad de los animales hasta que ésta ya no pueda negarse. ¿No sería mejor argumentar, por si acaso, lo contrario, para no maltratar innecesariamente a los animales?”
― Peter Wohlleben, La vida interior de los animales