A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

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

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

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.

There are various eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes: and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

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.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

God created man, but I could do better.

It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

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.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

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.

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

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

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

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe. I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

Sometimes I write about my own life. And sometimes I write about situations I see my friends going through. Sometimes I write about a scene I saw in a movie. I take inspiration from all different places.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

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.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

What one fool can understand, another can.

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.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

Man is by nature a political animal.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

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

The true cost to the world of a burger is far greater than the money you hand over to buy it.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.