To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

If you don’t have sustainable energy, you have unsustainable energy. The fundamental value of a company like Tesla is the degree to which it accelerates the advent of sustainable energy faster than it would otherwise occur.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

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

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

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

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

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

My production and songwriting and the environment around those vocals are not inspired by R&B at all.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

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.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

I talk to fashion designers and say I want some money to save the rainforest, and they say, ‚Oh, I agree with you completely Vivienne. Yes, climate change, it’s definitely happening,‘ but they don’t feel that they can do anything about it; they don’t even think ‚Well let’s stop it!‘

I have a company, and I’ve got to think about that. I’m trying to do my best there, and that’s a much harder task. We recycle as much as possible, and we conserve. But I’ve always been one to save everything – I even walk up stairs on the very inside or the very outside to not wear out the tread.

As soon as a redwood is cut down or burned, it sends up a crowd of eager, hopeful shoots, which, if allowed to grow, would in a few decades attain a height of a hundred feet, and the strongest of them would finally become giants as great as the original tree.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

I just think people should invest in the world. Don’t invest in fashion, but invest in the world.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

I think California has the best energy.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

When I prepare, I am not messing around. I find the right places, the right people, and the right environment. Iceland is one of those places.

Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it’s a good place that we’re all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.

You should be attacking the carbon emissions, period, and whether it’s cap-and-trade or carbon tax or whatever, that’s the realm in which we should be playing.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

It’s not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it’s a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it’s the right thing to do. It’s economics 101, elementary stuff.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.