Nature is energy and struggle. It is what exists without any promise. If it can be thought of by man as an arena, a setting, it has to be thought of as one which lends itself as much to evil as to good. Its energy is fearsomely indifferent.

John Berger
About This Quote

In this quote, Joseph Conrad expresses his views of nature and how he believes it can be used for good or evil. If nature exists without promise, then it exists without the possibility of being controlled by man. In order to control nature, man must shape it in a certain way. If nature is indifferent, then it will always shape itself in a certain way. If this is the case, then man can shape nature into whatever he wants it to be.

Source: Why Look At Animals?

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy - Isaac Newton

  2. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? - Annie Dillard

  3. When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough. - Hediger

  4. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more - George Gordon Byron

  5. The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean. - Robinson Jeffers

More Quotes By John Berger
  1. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

  2. A man's death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the...

  3. My heart born nakedwas swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it worepoems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my backthe poetry I had read. So I lived for half a centuryuntil wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I...

  4. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

  5. When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything...

Related Topics