Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

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

Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

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

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

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

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

I can’t even speak Hawaiian, but if you go there and listen to a Hawaiian song, you get captured because it’s so beautiful, like the melody is just gorgeous and you know Bob Marley is on the radio every single day. It’s very reggae-influenced down there. Basically, you haven’t been to paradise if you haven’t been to Hawaii.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

I’m crepuscular.

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.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

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.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

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.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

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.

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.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

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.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

Nature has always had more force than education.

When I was a seminarian, I was dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle’s wedding. I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance… and, well, I was bowled over for quite a while.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

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.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

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

I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Girls are soft and pretty.

Elegance is achieved when all that is superfluous has been discarded and the human being discovers simplicity and concentration: the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful it will be.

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.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

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.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

I believe in manicures. I believe in overdressing. I believe in primping at leisure and wearing lipstick. I believe in pink. I believe happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day, and… I believe in miracles.