Natural law quotes:

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  • Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws. -- Barbara Kingsolver
  • Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis. -- Henry Norris Russell
  • Christianity [is] a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. -- Adolf Hitler
  • I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law. -- Barry Diller
  • There is one unity, unified wholeness, total natural law, in the transcendental unified consciousness. -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
  • Attitude is your acceptance of the natural laws, or your rejection of the natural laws. -- Jim Rohn
  • Attitude is your acceptance of the natural laws, or your rejection of the natural laws. -- Jim Rohn
  • A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws. -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression. -- Eugene Wigner
  • Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law. -- St. Jerome
  • If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from. -- Robert Benchley
  • There is a natural law, a Divine law, that obliges you and me to relieve the suffering, the distressed and the destitute. -- Conrad Hilton
  • It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed. -- James Prescott Joule
  • All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws. -- John Coltrane
  • The natural law of inertia: Matter will remain at rest or continue in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force. -- W. Clement Stone
  • Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. -- Friedrich Engels
  • In recent times, more and more human thinking has come to assume that the idea of a universal natural law and the idea of 'God' are pointing to one and the same reality. -- Wilhelm Reich
  • The constitution of the universe is total natural law. 'Natural law,' we say from the field of science. 'Will of God,' we say from the field of religion. It's the same thing. -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
  • Positivism eliminates any kind of natural law principle - for example, that there are economic laws which can be transgressed only at your peril. With positivism, there is a tendency to leap into ad hoc economic theory. -- Murray Rothbard
  • The bird has an honor that man does not have. Man lives in the traps of his abdicated laws and traditions; but the birds live according to the natural law of God who causes the earth to turn around the sun. -- Khalil Gibran
  • Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws - a thing which can never be demonstrated. -- Tryon Edwards
  • Marriage is treated by all civilized societies as a peculiar and favored contract. It is in its origin a contract of natural law . . . . It is the parent, and not the child of society; the source of civility and a sort of seminary of the republic. -- Joseph Story
  • The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights... Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race. -- Ludwig von Mises
  • But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law. -- Herman Melville
  • The very idea of law originates in men's natural rights. There is no other standard, than natural rights, by which civil law can be measured. Law has always been the name of that rule or principle of justice, which protects those rights. Thus we speak of natural law. -- Lysander Spooner
  • The discovery of natural law is a meeting with God. -- Friedrich Dessauer
  • It's a natural law: You receive as much as you give. -- Paul Karasik
  • Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing. -- Anton Webern
  • The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution. -- Russell Kirk
  • An accident is an inevitable occurrence due to the actions of immutable natural laws. -- Ambrose Bierce
  • Those fields which most depend upon authoritative opinion for their data least contain known natural law. -- L. Ron Hubbard
  • If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers. -- Randy Alcorn
  • Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it. -- Karl Popper
  • The right to privacy has both positive and negative connotations for those who consider themselves part of the natural law tradition. -- David Novak
  • The natural law is the origin and principle of all virtues and their acts, therefore we must first speak about natural law. -- William of Auxerre
  • There's a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone. -- Sylvester Stallone
  • Celibacy is not natural to men or to women; all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and celibacy is a disregard of natural law. -- Annie Besant
  • The gold standard sooner or later will return with the force and inevitability of natural law, for it is the money of freedom and honesty. -- Hans F. Sennholz
  • Law is twofold -- natural and written. The natural law is in the heart, the written law on tables. All men are under the natural law. -- Ambrose
  • Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure. -- Adolf Hitler
  • To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Music is all about training in harmony, training to understand and use musical energy for our greater pleasure by attuning to the natural laws of the universe. -- Jane Siberry
  • Difficulties are opportunities to better things; they are stepping-stones to greater experience...When one door closes, another always opens; as a natural law it has to, to balance. -- Bryan Adams
  • Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds. -- Dan Brown
  • Money was established for exchange, but interest causes it to be reproduced by itself. Therefore this way of earning money is greatly in conflict with the natural law. -- Aristotle
  • Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws. -- Constantin Stanislavski
  • As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country. -- Vladimir Sorokin
  • Providence is but another name for natural law. Natural law itself would go out in a minute if it were not for the divine thought that is behind it. -- Henry Ward Beecher
  • The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. -- Albert Einstein
  • Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deepslowbreathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands. -- T.F. Hodge
  • It is a natural law that like causes always produce like effects; and, therefore, any man or woman who learns to do things in this certain way will infallibly get rich. -- Wallace D. Wattles
  • Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deep...slow...breathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands. -- T.F. Hodge
  • He has created the poor savage with no guide but natural law, and it is to their hearts that He deigns to stoop. They are His wild flowers whose homeliness delights Him. -- Therese of Lisieux
  • Whether arrived at through reason or revelation... natural law is the highest law known to man. It is anchored in the very existential nature of man and is therefore a priori just. -- Ilana Mercer
  • The same ones who brought the children physically in the world have the natural obligation binding in the natural law to provide for the mental, moral and social upbringing of their offspring. -- John Hardon
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  • Theories of "natural law" and the "law of nations" are another excellent example of discussions destitute of all exactness. [...] "Natural law" is simply that law of which the person using the phrase approves[....] -- Vilfredo Pareto
  • If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law! -- Grace Hopper
  • Principles are natural laws that are external to us and that ultimately control the consequences of our actions. Values are internal and subjective and represent that which we feel strongest about in guiding our behavior. -- Stephen Covey
  • Modern research divides nature into tiny pieces and conducts tests that conform neither with natural law nor with practical experience. The results are arranged for the convenience of research, not according to the needs of the farmer. -- Masanobu Fukuoka
  • The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation. -- J. M. Coetzee
  • Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. -- Margaret Sanger
  • Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes. -- James Hervey
  • Ours is a representative republic with a Constitution in which is recognized the natural law and the natural rights of man. It is a republic with a spiritual foundation characterized by freedom - freedom for the individual and for his society. -- Ezra Taft Benson
  • There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold; in short, need. -- Stendhal
  • More than once, the broken moon would cast through the window a silver light and remind me of independent events yielding to their own momentum and interacting under natural laws while my mind would impose happiness, grief, beauty, ruin, justice and chaos. -- Leonard Seet
  • Three ideas stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule; the idea of natural law; the idea of age-long growth or evolution. -- Robert Andrews Millikan
  • [P]erfect freedom consists in obeying the dictates of right reason, and submitting to natural law. When a man goes beyond or contrary to the law of nature and reason, he . . . introduces confusion and disorder into society . . . [thus] where licentiousness begins, liberty ends. -- Samuel West
  • It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits. -- K. Eric Drexler
  • Children learn many principles of natural law at a very early age. For example: they learn that when one child has picked up an apple or a flower, it is his, and that his associates must not take it from him against his will. -- Lysander Spooner
  • Every movement in the market is the result of a natural law and of a Cause which exists long before the Effect takes place and can be determined years in advance. The future is but a repetition of the past, as the Bible plainly states... -- William Delbert Gann
  • There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. -- John Dewey
  • To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable -- Steven Erikson
  • For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights. -- David Novak
  • It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is; and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding. -- Alfred Korzybski
  • I feel a terrifically painful disturbance in the natural law of things between men and women that must be balanced in the next few thousand years. What has been done in the name of holding up masculine energy as God and feminine energy as subservient has really wiped out everything. -- Rebecca De Mornay
  • What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law. -- Kurt Vonnegut
  • We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones. -- Jules Verne
  • All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species. -- John W. Gardner
  • Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid. -- Max Weber
  • Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy. -- William Gilmore Simms
  • What law, what reason can deny that gift so sweet, so natural that God has given a stream, a fish, a beast, a bird? -- Pedro Calderon de la Barca
  • Hard labour to succeed in the world? Hard labour no, no, human constitution, human physiology, human intelligence is made of infinite creative potential of Natural Law and therefore no-one has to work hard for success. -- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
  • I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists. -- Hermann von Helmholtz
  • While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland. -- George Combe
  • Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment. -- Kenneth Rexroth
  • The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. -- Peter Medawar
  • Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government. They receive it with their being from the hand of nature. Individuals exercise it by their single will; collections of men by that of their majority; for the law of the majority is the natural law of every society of men. -- Thomas Jefferson
  • A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. -- Martin Luther
  • For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It's about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words - 'I might be wrong.' -- David Brin
  • If you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest challenges, identify and apply the principle or natural law that governs the results you seek. How we apply a principle will vary greatly and will be determined by our unique strengths, talents, and creativity, but, ultimately, success in any endeavor is always derived from acting in harmony with the principles to which the success is tied. -- Stephen Covey
  • No State shall pass any law impairing the [natural] obligation of contracts. -- Lysander Spooner
  • Natural law. Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers. -- Paul Newman
  • All... natural rights may be abridged or modified in [their] exercise by law. -- Thomas Jefferson
  • If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers. -- Christina Stead
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  • The law of gratitude is the natural principle that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions. -- Wallace D. Wattles
  • With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • When something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to say, "By God, we need to pass a law and do something." -- Milton Friedman
  • The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong. -- Benjamin Cardozo
  • Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance. -- Saint Augustine
  • The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong. -- Benjamin Cardozo
  • No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law. -- Pope Paul VI
  • Freedom is a man's natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • It is a principle of law, that a person intends to do that which is the natural effect of what he does. -- Edward Law, 1st Earl of Ellenborough
  • The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down, but which appeals to the hearts of all. -- Victor Cousin
  • Until relatively recently, law enforcement's ability to determine an individual's location and track their movements was largely limited to natural human powers of observation. -- Ron Wyden
  • The law, which restrains a man from doing mischief to his fellow citizens, though it diminishes the natural, increases the civil liberty of mankind. -- William Blackstone
  • Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law. -- Henry Campbell Black
  • What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right. -- Bernard Bailyn
  • Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. -- James Madison
  • The truth of Moore's law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant. -- Bill Gates
  • The sentiment of justice is so natural, and so universally acquired by all mankind, that it seems to be independent of all law, all party, all religion. -- Voltaire
  • Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction. -- Lysander Spooner
  • As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world. -- Stephen Batchelor
  • Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences. -- Murray Rothbard
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  • Natural law has decreed it so. Isn't death as much a part of the flow as life? Why fight it? Because maybe the flow splashes into a bottomless pit past that blind turn. -- Thomm Quackenbush
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