There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

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.

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

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in ’86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

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.

Water’s never clumsy.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

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.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn’t speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn’t speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

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

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

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.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

Walking is man’s best medicine.

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

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

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

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Most Africans don’t get to see these wild animals at all. Once they see and learn about them, they are much more likely to become involved in protecting the environment.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliche anymore.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!