A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

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.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

I did stand-up, weird and ignorant stuff about my career – anything for a laugh.

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.

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?

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Walking is man’s best medicine.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering.

Since childhood, I’ve been a clown. I’ve always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It’s my original self.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

I often joke that 100 years from now I hope people are saying, ‚Dang, she looks good for her age!‘

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

My husband calls me ‚catfish.‘ He says I’m all mouth and no brains.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

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

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says, ‚Yes,‘ you know he is a crook.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they’re eating sandwiches.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

For greed all nature is too little.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

My mother is from another time – the funniest person to her is Lucille Ball; that’s what she loves. A lot of times she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I know if I wasn’t her son and she was flipping through the TV and saw me, she would just keep going.

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

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

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.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

When you’re in comedy, people always come up and say, ‚Oh, it must be so hard.‘ It really isn’t hard unless you’re not good at it. If you can do it, its really kind of fun and easy.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

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.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‚O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.‘ And God granted it.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

I’m crazy, but I’m not stupid.

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.

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

Man is by nature a political animal.

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

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius – or French.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.