The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint. I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

These births and deaths are changes in nature which we are mistaking for changes in us.

Procreation is nature's principal occupation, and every man, whether he be young or old, when meeting every woman measures the potentiality of sex between them.