All the world lies warm in one heart, yet the Sierra seems to get more light than other mountains. The weather is mostly sunshine embellished with magnificent storms, and nearly everything shines from base to summit – the rocks, streams, lakes, glaciers, irised falls, and the forests of silver fir and silver pine.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Lightning is something which, again, we would rather avoid.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

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.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams – they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do – they all contain truths.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

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

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

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

If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks – that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The earth laughs in flowers.

For greed all nature is too little.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

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

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

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

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

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

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

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.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

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

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

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.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Gardening is not a rational act.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience – which is definitely an acquired taste.