Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.
I was being groomed to be a tennis player for sure. My grandparents and parents realised I had a natural athletic ability and if I was forced to do it, I could probably do well. But all I wanted was to play pretend.
I taught myself how to play the guitar, I taught myself how to play the drums, and I kind of fake doing both of them. But drumming comes more natural to me, and it just feels better.
In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.
I don't know if I'm so much fueled by trying to one-up myself so much as passionate about coming up with new and greater challenges. I don't see it as a contest, but as a natural progression.
Unlike running on a road or concrete, natural surfaces are more forgiving and offer a more varied terrain, ultimately resulting in less repetitive micro-trauma to bones and joints than running on hard pavement does.
[They] pervert the course of nature [by saying] the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns. [John Calvin illustrating his opposition to heliocentrism in a sermon due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]
Harmony is about bringing things into balance and knowing how to go from sunrise to sunset. Mother Nature teaches this to us, in so many ways, each and every day.
I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.
Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.
Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
Darkness is a natural fear, one that takes the things you love most, the most valuable innocence, and turns them against you. The struggle is to see past the illusions, and see the light in your fear.
What is likely to vanish - or be transformed beyond recognition - are many of the things we think of when we think of Australia: the barrier reef, the koalas, the sense of the country as a land of almost limitless natural resources.
The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.
Seeing the rebirth of the Delaware Estuary as a valuable natural resource is certainly encouraging, and I am encouraged not just by the progress made in the Delaware Estuary but in estuaries throughout the country.
I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
A famous name has this peculiarity that it becomes gradually smaller especially in natural sciences where each succeeding discovery invariably overshadows what precedes.
Science contributes to our culture in many ways, as a creative intellectual activity in its own right, as the light which has served to illuminate man's place in the universe, and as the source of understanding of man's own nature.
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.
And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.
Men at a distance, who have admired our systems of government unfounded in nature, are apt to accuse the rulers, and say that taxes have been assessed too high and collected too rigidly.
