These naturalism quotes will inspire you. Naturalism, action, inclination, or thought based only on natural desires and instincts or (in art and literature) a style and theory of representation based on the accurate depiction of detail.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging naturalism quotes, naturalism sayings, and naturalism proverbs.
Best Naturalism Quotes
- “Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
- “When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.” ~ Stephen Crane
- “Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.” ~ John Desmond Bernal
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“We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.” ~ Ben Okri
- “If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
- “The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
- “Evolutionists … have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” ~ Richard Lewontin
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“I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.” ~ Marisa Tomei
- “Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.” ~ Hu Shih
- “Once a photographer is convinced that the camera can lie and that, strictly speaking, the vast majority of photographs are camera lies, inasmuch as they tell only part of a story or tell it in distorted form, half the battle is won. Once he has conceded that photography is not a naturalistic medium of rendition and that striving for naturalism in a photograph is futile, he can turn his attention to using a camera to make more effective pictures.” ~ Andreas Feininger
- “Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.” ~ Philip Johnson
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“The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist… The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.” ~ Sid Grossman
- “Looking at the doctrine of Darwinism, which undergirded my atheism for so many years, it didn’t take me long to conclude that it was simply too far-fetched to be credible. I realized that if I were to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that: 1. Nothing produces everything 2. Non-life produces life 3. Randomness produces fine-tuning 4. Chaos produces information 5. Unconsciousness produces consciousness 6. Non-reason produces reason….The central pillars of evolutionary theory quickly rotted away when exposed to scrutiny.” ~ Lee Strobel
- “I don’t bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.” ~ Greg Graffin
- “The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure [science] fiction. Theories and laws do not bring matter/energy into existence. The view that they nevertheless somehow have the capacity seems a rather desperate refuge…from the alternative possibility…Trying to avoid the clear evidence for the existence of a divine intelligence behind nature, atheist scientists are forced to ascribe creative powers to less and less credible candidates like mass/energy and the laws of nature.” ~ John Lennox
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“When you are playing an egomaniac running a fantastical ship, you don’t want him to be too suburban. Naturalism doesn’t work on the high seas.” ~ Geoffrey Rush
- “A lot of people inspire me. I’m a huge movie buff. From studying and watching movies, over and over again, directly influential are Terrence Malik and his naturalism, Robert Altman and his exploration of improvisation, and Judd Apatow, in terms of his comedic process.” ~ David Gordon Green
- “Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.” ~ Alex Grey
- “The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.” ~ William A. Dembski
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“Nature rarely does anything mathematically perfect, and naturalism results from imperfections and deviations.” ~ Margaret Wertheim
- “I admire David Hare as much as I admire certainly any writer ever. What I like about his writing is it is very conscientiously, in one way, an attempt to reproduce the way people actually speak, but it’s not just an attempt at naturalism. It’s stylised and it’s heightened, to great effect. It’s elegant and it’s funny and that’s the way to my heart, frankly.” ~ Bill Nighy
- “A real naturalistic approach, I would claim, should take the reality of mental representation as a natural fact. A lot can be said about this fact, but there is no need to say it all in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions which are stated in non-intentional terms. The idea that naturalism might require that all the truths should be stated in a particular kind of vocabulary now strikes me as a very peculiar one.” ~ Tim Crane
- “The challenge and the goal was to get inside Owen’s [Suskind] world, because I really wanted to see it through his point of view. To achieve that naturalism, I used a screen in front of a camera as I interviewed him” ~ Roger Ross Williams
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“I think I’m trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It’s not the way people talk in life at all.” ~ Wallace Shawn
- “”Methodological naturalism” and “metaphysical naturalism” are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn’t postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn’t whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.” ~ Elliott Sober
- “Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It’s because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.” ~ Tim Cran
- “There has certainly been a great deal of work addressing the relationship between naturalism and the first-person perspective. Quite a number of philosophers have suggested that there are features of the first-person perspective that naturalism just cannot accommodate, whether it be qualitative character, or consciousness, or simply the ability we have to think of ourselves in a distinctively first-person manner.” ~ Hilary Kornblith
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“I love acting, especially if it’s a fantasy of some kind, where it’s not just realistic, it’s not naturalism.” ~ Gene Wilder
- “Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call “methodological naturalismp.” It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.” ~ Elliott Sober
- “There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?” ~ Nancy Pearcey
- “We just, you know, we’re just sort of doing it like Bewitched, because we just think that the character of Kenny is so specific and so outrageous and so fun. And by far the hardest character to cast out of everybody to find someone who was capable of, you know, doing, you know, the comedy and just with the broadness and to be also just a really brilliant actor, you know, to do naturalism.” ~ Debra Messing
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“Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone – not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us.” ~ Nancy Pearcey
- “I think I like about coming-of-age stories is that there’s everything in them. It’s a genre that kind of contains everything: you have the chronicle, you can go into naturalism, but it’s also about transforming physically, so it’s kind of a fantastical genre.” ~ Celine Sciamma
- “I always considered Ray Harryhausen’s work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.” ~ Nick Park
- “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.” ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans
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“I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist’s early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.” ~ Irvin Kershner
- “This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people’s ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don’t want to know–which means that for twenty-five years he’s been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.” ~ Aaron Siskind
- “Modernist discourse […] incorporates semantic devices – such as the labeling of theism as ‘religion’ and naturalism as ‘science’ – that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
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“Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.” ~ Arthur Balfour
- “Science…has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must have included any role for God.” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
- “I love a certain kind of acting style that I would call non-American, which tends to be more detail-oriented and less externalized. There’s a kind of naturalism that I often find in non-American actors. I also find that quality in the American actors I work with, but I like to bring in those influences creatively.” ~ Ira Sach
- “I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn’t like the ‘naturalism,’ the sad or the ‘down-to-earth’ characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor – and beautiful women.” ~ Christian Louboutin
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“If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.” ~ Alvin Plantinga
- “All Jews, however, in proportion as they are one with the leaders and rulers of their race, will oppose the influence of the supernatural Life of Grace in society and will be an active ferment of Naturalism.” ~ Denis Fahey
- “Now, as when I made films that were too autobiographical, the problem is how to escape naturalism. If you tell a strictly true story, because the way you are telling it is false, it creates naturalism. But I become a naturalist. And to become a naturalist is something I avoid. It is fake life – that is the problem. It is because we are familiar with situationnisme, and the critique of the spectacle, et cetera, which is a very fair criticism. People who have no life, and who watch this fake life on a screen – it’s a very alienated situation. And that’s what situationnisme is about.” ~ Philippe Garrel
- “I’m not attracted to naturalism, I’m not attracted to behavior, I’m attracted to dance. I’m attracted to gesture, I’m attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I’m a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies.” ~ Willem Dafoe
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“Obviously we know Bill Hader is funny and charming, but my question is, can he do raw humanity and naturalism? I think so.” ~ Mark Duplass
- “Naturalism is the view that the physical world is a self-contained system that works by blind, unbroken natural laws. Naturalism doesn’t come right out and say there’s nothing beyond nature. Rather, it says that nothing beyond nature could have any conceivable relevance to what happens in nature. Naturalism’s answer to theism is not atheism but benign neglect. People are welcome to believe in God, though not a God who makes a difference in the natural order.” ~ William A. Dembski
- “What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you’re going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can’t be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You’re looking for the poetry in something, and I don’t mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.” ~ John Guare
- “What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem….Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker’s beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71)” ~ Thomas Nagel
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“It’s part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.” ~ Michel Gondry
- “As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it’s not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea.” ~ Shawn Anthony Levy
- “It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.” ~ William Gibson
- “It would be impossible to accept naturalism itself if we really and consistently believed naturalism. For naturalism is a system of thought. But for naturalism all thoughts are mere events with irrational causes. It is, to me at any rate, impossible to regard the thoughts which make up naturalism in that way and, at the same time, regard them as a real insight into external reality…If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.” ~ C. S. Lewis
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“Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.” ~ David Bentley Hart
- “I’m not able to completely escape naturalism. It’s very difficult to escape from naturalism without being too dry. That’s what I try to do in my cinema – escape naturalism and do films that are, at the same time, realistic but have a lot of fantasy. It’s very difficult in cinema to get away from what life is about, from real life. The way the actors work has to be realistic – you can’t do Baroque acting – so it’s very complicated. And, we’re human beings, so we’re not perfect. I’m trying to do something different.” ~ Philippe Garrel
- “I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.” ~ Hilary Kornblith
- “When I began in the late ’90s, I felt quite lonely. We were coming out of the grunge era; it was the time of Corinne Day, The Face, the height of the YBAs, where models had to be “real,” on real locations with no lighting. I rebelled against the grungeys – I didn’t find the faux naturalism to be representative!” ~ Miles Aldridge
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“Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)” ~ Michael Shermer
- “My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundamental problem that sparks the ethical project lies in our limited responsiveness to one another. The only way we have to address that problem is through a representative, informed, and engaged conversation.” ~ Philip Kitcher , Ethical naturalism quotes
- “Because to me, what is interesting about this movie [Real Steel] is its combination of relationship naturalism with. It’s like a single conceit movie. The world and the people are very much the way we know them to be, but this sport has evolved.” ~ Shawn Anthony Levy
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“Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.” ~ Greg Graffin
- “If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this. … We call our strategy the “wedge.”” ~ Phillip E. Johnson
- “I’m trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. The way I write is about life and is quite truthful, and there is a kind of brutal side to the relationship, and to the feelings, that makes it somewhat painful, but I think it’s a very intense portrait of the relationship of two people. And a bit about what people feel like when they’re alone, because it all takes place in one day, and during the day, they spend a lot of time alone in their different – you get to imagine what their fantasy lives are like.” ~ Wallace Shawn
