If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

‚Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Children are all foreigners.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Man is fond of counting his troubles, but he does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought to, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

History is more or less bunk.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

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

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

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.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

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.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

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

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

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

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.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.