Nature

All vices fight against Nature, all forsake the due order.

Do they not seem to you to live against Nature who exchange their dress with women?

Therefore, Lucilius, we must keep to the road that Nature has prescribed, and not turn aside from it;

The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature;

And therefore it is clear that none of the moral virtues formed is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

For there are many both flocks and plants which cannot be safe without the care of men.

But Nature has provided abundantly and copiously the food fitted for each living creature.

And for the use of speech it is incredible, unless you attend diligently, how great works Nature has contrived.

Whence, then, can we more rightly begin than from our common parent, Nature?

Who, whatever she begot — not only the animal, but even that which sprung from the earth so as to rest on its own stalks — willed that each thing should be perfect in its own kind.

And as to the beasts a different chief thing was given by nature to each, which each retains as its own and does not depart from it, so to man something far more excellent — although those things ought to be called excellent which have some comparison;

Of these, nature is something irregular and incalculable, and peculiar to each individual;

they seek for it, and when they find it, they set it forth as a general commandment, equal and identical for all.

For if he is well-disposed towards father and mother, and so observes the great law of nature, which is laid down alike for man and beast, that all should love their parents, then he must clearly be ill-disposed to those who have destroyed them and to their laws and their constitution.

Because distinct things are [finite and] measured;

— [therefore] the vyakta / avyakta (unmanifest) cause exists.

"There is nothing more delicate [modest] than prakṛti / pradhāna / mūlaprakṛti (nature)" — such is my conviction;

All is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O Nature;

He is an abscess on the universe who withdraws and cuts himself off from the reason of our common nature through discontent with what befalls;

Observe continually that all things come to be by change, and accustom yourself to consider that the Nature of the Whole loves nothing so much as to change what exists and to make new things like them.

Nature gave your brother life, gave it also to you.

Nature has declared that she will make for no one an exception from her necessity.

Nature gave him to you, as she gave their brothers to others, not as a possession but as a loan;

For what else is Nature than God, and a divine reason implanted in the whole world and in its parts?

Nature has begotten us for both ends, for the contemplation of things and for action.

Therefore I live in accordance with Nature if I have given myself wholly to her, if I am her admirer and her worshipper.

and she not only raised man upright, but, in order to make him fit for contemplation, so that he might follow the stars as they glide from their rising to their setting and turn his face round together with the whole heaven, she set his head on high and placed it upon a supple neck.

For we must take Nature as our guide;

To live happily, then, is the same thing as to live according to Nature.

Meanwhile, in accordance with what all the Stoics agree upon, I give my assent to the nature of things;

Why do we complain of Nature?

Hence too the grievance of Aristotle, ill befitting a wise man, when he arraigns Nature:

The greater part of mankind, Paulinus, complains of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, and because these allotted spaces of time run out so swiftly, so headlong, that, with very few exceptions, life leaves the rest of us in the very midst of our preparations for living.

I knew into how turbulent a fellowship Nature had shut me up.

' Should Nature, who first entrusted us to ourselves, call us to account, to her too we shall say:

In one's own troubles, too, one ought so to bear oneself as to grant to grief only as much as Nature demands, not as much as custom does;