First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf.

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

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

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

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

I love having my hands in the dirt. It is never a science and always an art. There are no rules. And if it comes down to me versus that weed I’m trying to pull out of the ground that doesn’t want to come out? I know I’ll win.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

Success isn’t supposed to happen, no matter how hard you work. There’s no guarantee you’re going to succeed. There’s nothing set in stone.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

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

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

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.

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

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

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

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it’s the most aspirational diet because it’s so easy. It’s quite simple, the cooking I do.

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.

Nature hates calculators.

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

Every time I plant a seed, He say kill it before it grow, he say kill it before they grow.

Expect me to continue what I’ve been doing, which is trying to take over the world.

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.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

Since the child knew his parents would give in, he tried the same trick again and again.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

Oh, the difference between nearly right and exactly right.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

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.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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

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

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

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.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

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

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

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

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

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.