Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

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

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

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

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.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

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.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

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

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.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

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

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

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

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

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Nature does nothing in vain.

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.

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.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

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

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

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.

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.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

When I get logical, and I don’t trust my instincts – that’s when I get in trouble.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

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

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Where the senses fail us, reason must step in.

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

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

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

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

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

It is a curious historical fact that modern quantum mechanics began with two quite different mathematical formulations: the differential equation of Schroedinger and the matrix algebra of Heisenberg. The two apparently dissimilar approaches were proved to be mathematically equivalent.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

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

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