Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild; In Wit a man; Simplicity, a child.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

But ever since I was a kid, I was always the winner.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is always a smoke.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

The exercise of benevolence is joy to loving hearts: the more pain it costs, the more joy it is. Kind actions make us happy, and in such joy we find communion with the great heart of Jesus.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren’t joyful. They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

The joy and love that I get from playing football are unbelievable. It is such a feeling that I want to give everything that I have got. I just enjoy it, I am living a life that I never even dreamt of.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It’s so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you’re also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

If merely ‚feeling good‘ could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

My three children have brought me great joy.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, some way, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.