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BY NATURE
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I. (adverb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Through inherent nature
Example:
he was naturally lazy
Synonyms:
by nature; naturally
Classified under:
Context examples:
He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Not only was White Fang adaptable by nature, but he had travelled much, and knew the meaning and necessity of adjustment.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
Long, quiet days she spent, not lonely nor idle, for her little world was peopled with imaginary friends, and she was by nature a busy bee.
(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)
As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues, and have no conceptions or ideas of what is evil in a rational creature, so their grand maxim is, to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
I was born in the year 18— to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Besides, when ye talk of taking me to France, ye do not conceive how useless I should be to you, seeing that neither by training nor by nature am I fitted for the wars, and there seems to be nought but strife in those parts.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
And when farther pressed, had added, that in her opinion their dispositions were so totally dissimilar as to make mutual affection incompatible; and that they were unfitted for each other by nature, education, and habit.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books—or at least books of information—for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position, inferior: and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
