A Quote by Stephen Fry
Nature admits no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance.
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We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' of nature as I can guess at.
Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. We’re so used to evaluating everything (and everyone) by their usefulness that this thought will take a minute or two to begin to dawn on us. Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Which is to say, beauty is in and of itself a great and glorious good, something we need in large and daily doses.
To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.
In the final analysis the hierarchic pattern is nothing like the straightforward witness for organic evolution that is commonly assumed. There are facets of the hierarchy which do not flow naturally from any sort of random undirected evolutionary process. If the hierarchy suggests any model of nature it is typology and not evolution. How much easier it would be to argue the case for evolution if all nature's divisions were blurred and indistinct, if the systema naturalae was largely made up of overlapping classes indicative of sequence and continuity.
Nature admits no lie.
Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.
When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
The object of all education should be to increase the usefulness of man - usefulness to himself and others.
Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.
A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.
All mathematicians share... a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and the mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.
The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each.
Women are networkers, women hate hierarchy and especially entrepreneurs hate hierarchy because when they see hierarchy structured in they see rules and regulations are commonplace, and they want to tear it down.
Absolute ugliness is admitted as rarely as perfect beauty; but degrees of it more or less distinct are associated with whatever has the nature of death and sin, just as beauty is associated with what has the nature of virtue and of life.
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