James Joyce

"Our lust is brief.  We are means to those small creatures within us, and nature has other ends than we."

I believe that Joyce was referring to the brevity of life and the whole of nature and the existence of a consciousness related to that whole.  Humans are only a part of the whole of the fauna and flora.  We're not the purpose of nature.  Nature is not an entity that exists outside of us for our exploitation.  We are a small, but exceptional part of it.  But, that is all.  In the end, we rarely get to see what got us.  These creatures are just too small.