Man Vs Nature Quotes

“Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

“We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.”
― John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

“So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.”
― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights

“Still, he was angry--that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature.”
― Cutter Nick

“Free will is never without charge and is costliest when an individual chooses selfishness and avarice over the common good. Some think animals dumb but mark the instinctive co-operation of insects while men murder and steal and tell me we are superior.”
― Stewart Stafford

“It was a small church. No large cathedral towers overshadowed the purpose of the house of worship. It was a monument to faith rather than a monument to man’s triumph over nature.”
― Richard W. Kelly, Testament

“Forget the buildings and the monuments. Let the softness of dark come in, all those light-years between stars and planets. Cities were the works of men but the earth before and after those cities, outside and beneath and around them, was the dream of a sleeping leviathan--it was god sleeping there and dreaming, the same god that was time and transfiguration. From whatever dreamed the dream at the source, atom or energy, flowed all the miracles of evolution--tiger, tiger burning bright, the massive whales in the deep, luminescent specters in their mystery. The pearls that were their eyes, their tongues that were wet leaves, their bodies that were the bodies of the fantastic.

Spectacular bestiaries of heaven, the limbs and tails of the gentle and the fearsome, silent or raging at will . . . they could never be known in every detail and they never should be.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“Snakes shed their skin, cats their fur, manta rays their teeth. Man sheds used-up objects: he leaves an open Nesquik tin and a dirty glass on the kitchen counter, an open toothpaste tube, unmade beds, their sheets stained with urine; he leaves grandfather clocks, cigarette burns in the ashtrays, comics that have been scrawled on and books borrowed from the school library; he leaves clothes in the wardrobes and food in the fridge.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“Mother Nature is a self-taught engineer.”
― Stewart Stafford