Nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.
naturequotes
We can be sure, he [Kant] says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics.
A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child subject still to her power but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother.
mystery / nature / power / revolutions / space
The whole conception of ‘sin’ is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature.
The differences which come under the first head are those which nature herself has set between man and man.
differences / man / nature
Man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object than causing pain. No animal ever torments another for the sake of tormenting: but man does so, and it is this which constitutes the diabolical nature which is far worse than the merely bestial.
animal / man / nature / pain / tormenting
Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us.
decisions / Moral / nature / responsibility / World
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men – yes, and then to get around them.