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

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

All art is but imitation of nature.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

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

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

Man – a being in search of meaning.

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

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

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

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.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

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.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

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

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

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.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

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.

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.

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

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

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.

God is absence. God is the solitude of man.

One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

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

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

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

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

Nature hates calculators.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

For greed all nature is too little.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

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

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

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.