against nature

On one of these too frequent occasions he was boasting of his prowess as a pedestrian and athlete, and the outcome was a match against nature. For a stake of one sovereign he undertook to run all the way to Coventry and back, a distance of something more than forty miles.

Here at present I felt afresh--for I had felt it again and again-- how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

I have worn myself out trying to call you back to your own, to set the blood flowing once more in your veins, to break for one moment the barriers which you had set up against Nature herself.

From his past life, from his resolution to shrink from nothing, the count had acquired an inconceivable relish for the contests in which he had engaged, sometimes against nature, that is to say, against God, and sometimes against the world, that is, against the devil.

It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it.

They had come back from strange refuges and hiding-places and had squatted down among the familiar houses and begun that hard struggle against nature for food which was now the chief interest of their lives.

And to find him sitting so quietly was surprising, like something against nature, inhuman.

Blasphemy against nature! Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him.

Valentin and Mademoiselle heard something; they knew their father's death was somehow against nature. Of course they couldn't accuse their mother, and, as I tell you, I was as dumb as that stone.

This subversion can be made, as we know all too well, but so to go against nature is to invite catastrophe.

His book Crimes Against Nature features a chapter on King Coal's devastation of the culture and environment of West Virginia.

As Robert Todd Carroll's Skeptical Dictionary points out, feng shui in its traditional form "relates to the very sensible notion that living with rather than against nature benefits both humans and our environment." But, he adds, this principle isn't always applied today.

Another student added that it "offers an opportunity to waken people up by describing the polluted, destroyed and neglected nature on the one hand, and by showing them the beauty, balance and respect for nature on the other." Yet another comments that "Nature writing can really do a lot to help us understand our destructive history and show us the right direction to heal by working with and not against nature." Students were most impressed with how Terry Tempest Williams encouraged them to "step out of line and take charge of our future," how a pen and a pad of paper could be weapons, and how she made them understand that in harming nature we are harming ourselves.

It exists whether one approves or not.") Shearer's work at times gains force through uncanny juxtaposition: In Owls, Butterflies, Corpsepaint, 2002, the spooky eyes of forest birds, butterfly-wing graphic design, and black-metal corpse paint posit an updated A Rebours of culture against nature, or nature as felicitously artificial as culture.

Pitting your wits against nature and a fairway is all very well...but who's looking after the spare set of clubs hundreds of yards away in the car park?