Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

It’s a brilliant surface in that sunlight. The horizon seems quite close to you because the curvature is so much more pronounced than here on earth. It’s an interesting place to be. I recommend it.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

Any East Coast road trip we have is very exciting, just being on the road, taking it all in.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

Adventures are to the adventurous.

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.

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

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

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

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

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

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

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

I love the sea.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work – not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

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.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

Juvenile crime is not naturally born in the boy, but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the individual.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

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.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

One can never know for sure what a deserted area looks like.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

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.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.