You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.
— William Lyon Phelps
Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.
— William Landay
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
— William James
Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.
— William Inge
Let us think of Nature as a builder, making all that we see out of atoms of a limited number of kinds, just as the builder of a house constructs it out of so many different kinds of things: bricks, slates, planks, panes of glass, and so on.
— William Henry Bragg
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
— William Hazlitt
Who of us is able to read and understand and be entirely confident of the validity of his title to the land he lives on, and which he has redeemed from a state of nature by the most indefatigable industry and perseverance?
— William H. Wharton
But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other.
— William H. Seward
A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.
— William Graham Sumner
What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature - these are the only objects worth being attached to.
— William Godwin
Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.
Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things - that religion which 'sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind,' which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration.
Man is nature's sole mistake.
— William Gilbert
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
— William Ellery Channing
To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language.
— William Cullen Bryant
Where hast thou wandered, gentle gale, to find the perfumes thou dost bring?
The groves were God's first temples.
Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.
— William Law
It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.
— William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.
— William Howard Taft
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.
I deem it established, then, that the Constitution does not recognize property in man, but leaves that question, as between the states, to the law of nature and of nations.
We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.
— William H. Gass
I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.
— William Golding
The admission of one man, either hereditarily or for life only, into the place of chief of a country, is an evidence of the infirmity of man. Nature has set up no difference between a king and other men; a king, therefore, is purely the creation of our own hands.
Man is a being of a mixed nature; and, as there is no integrity without its flaws, so is there no man so knavish but that in some things he may be trusted.
Till 1782, I believed in the doctrine of Calvin: that is, that the majority of mankind were objects of divine condemnation and that their punishment would be everlasting. The 'Systeme de la Nature,' read about the beginning of that year, changed my opinion and made me a Deist.
The simplicity and uniformity of rural occupations, and their incessant practice, preclude any anxieties and agitations of hope and fear, to which employments of a more precarious and casual nature are subject.
— William Falconer
The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.
Go forth under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings.
There is no glory in star or blossom till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes till breathed with joy as they wander by.
Thus happiness depends, as nature shows, less on exterior things than most suppose.
— William Cowper
Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.
A dislike of death is no proof of the want of religion. The instincts of nature shrink from it, for no creature can like its own dissolution. But though death is not desired, the result of it may be, for dying to the Christian is the way to life eternal.
— William Jay
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
— William Irwin Thompson
There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.
— William Henry Harrison
The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.
Before the tribunal of nature, a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence, if he can find within himself the powers with which to do it.
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
How are the faculties of man to be best developed and his happiness secured? The state of a king is not favorable to this, nor the state of the noble and rich men of the earth. All this is artificial life, the inventions of vanity and grasping ambition, by which we have spoiled the man of nature and of pure, simple, and undistorted impulses.
In the summer of 1791, I gave up my concern in the 'New Annual Register,' the historical part of which I had written for seven years, and abdicated, I hope forever, the task of performing a literary labour, the nature of which should be dictated by anything but the promptings of my own mind.
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
— William Ernest Henley
The very nature of the government, and the direction it's been heading in for the past 40 years, is one of contrived government solutions to all the problems in the United States.
— William E. Simon
The moon is at her full, and riding high, Floods the calm fields with light. The airs that hover in the summer sky Are all asleep tonight.
The little windflower, whose just opened eye is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.
