The man of genius in tune with nature will bend history to his will.

...but nature scants that lights in all it makes, working in much the manner of a painter who knows the true art, but those whose brush hand shakes.

Natura și legile Naturii zăceau ascunse în beznă: Dumnezeu a spus să fie Newton! și s-a făcut lumină

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit
And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.
As on the land while here the ocean gains.
In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains
Thus in the soul while memory prevails,
The solid power of understanding fails
Where beams of warm imagination play,
The memory's soft figures melt away
One science only will one genius fit,
So vast is art, so narrow human wit
Not only bounded to peculiar arts,
But oft in those confined to single parts
Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before,
By vain ambition still to make them more
Each might his several province well command,
Would all but stoop to what they understand.

But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.

When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals.

È proprio vero che il Poeta, o il Filosofo, o l’Artista il cui genio è la gloria della sua epoca, viene ad essere diminuito per il fatto che senza dubbio è storicamente probabile, per non dire certo, che egli è il diretto discendente di qualche selvaggio nudo e bestiale, la cui intelligenza appena bastava a farlo un po’ più furbo della volpe, e per ciò stesso molto più pericoloso della tigre?

Con demasiada frecuencia la “noble sencillez” en las obras de la naturaleza tiene su origen en la noble ignorancia de quien las contempla.

Nature is the art of God

Man is simply playing by nature's rules,and art is man's attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator's hand

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret
et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix.
(Drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she'll come right back,
Victorious over your ignorant confident scorn.)

It is doubly a fault, you know, when against nature one assumes the color of a virtue, warping one's character in a direction not its own.

To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

Nature is the art of God.

Nature is the master of talents; genius is the master of nature.