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

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Man is by nature a political animal.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

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

The mountains are calling and I must go.

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

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

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

Because in a split second, it’s gone.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

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.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Life is wasted on the living.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

If a man or woman is born ten years sooner or later, their whole aspect and performance shall be different.

If you give a person a fish, they’ll fish for a day. But if you train a person to fish, they’ll fish for a lifetime.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

For greed all nature is too little.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch – which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.

Philosophy begins in wonder.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

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.

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

In every parting there is an image of death.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.