Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

I read Plato’s ‚Republic.‘ I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Silence is the mother of truth.

All men are born with a nose and five fingers, but no one is born with a knowledge of God.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

Which death is preferably to every other? ‚The unexpected‘.

I know, to banish anger altogether from one’s breast is a difficult task. It cannot be achieved through pure personal effort. It can be done only by God’s grace.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right; but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord’s side.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

I do think there must be some kind of interaction between your living life and the life that goes on from here.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‚Pensees‘ and read, ‚I am the great silent spaces between worlds.‘

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

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.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

Religion is just mind control.

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

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

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.

The blessed of us must save the less of us. I’m blessed, and yeah, I’m planning to go to Heaven.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

No man was ever wise by chance.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

If there really is a god, then he really looks after me.

God just has a way of working things out the way he wants to and you have no say in that.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‚passive action,‘ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy. Purity, in spite of outward appearances, is essentially an active virtue, because it concentrates God in us and on those who are subject to our influence.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.