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 went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

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

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

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

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

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

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

Nature has always had more force than education.

On all the peaks lies peace.

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

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

The Bay of Bengal is hit frequently by cyclones. The months of November and May, in particular, are dangerous in this regard.

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.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

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.

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

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

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Nature hates calculators.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

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

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

The sun doesn’t always shine in West Virginia, but the people do.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.

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 does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

The harness of waterfalls is the most economical method known for drawing energy from the sun.

Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, ‚convulsions of nature,‘ etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.

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.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

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

I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.