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

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

I’m just a simple country girl.

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

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.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

I could sing you a thousand and one doo-wop songs. I love the simplicity in that music. It’s not super-poetic, it’s just from the heart.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

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

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

I am a simple Buddhist monk – no more, no less.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

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

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

He has the most who is most content with the least.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

We’re one of the only animals in the world that don’t really think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals, and we must respect our fellow animals.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

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.

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.