Gardening is not a rational act.

In the case of the environment, there’s no one to bail it out.

The threat to the planet is us. It’s actually not a threat to the planet – it’s a threat to us.

I am two with nature.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Here at this site, Solyndra expects to make enough solar panels each year to generate 500 megawatts of electricity. And over the lifetime of this expanded facility, that could be like replacing as many as eight coal-fired power plants.

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.

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.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

I’ve often said there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.

Some bioengineering is good, especially if it results in plants that are more drought-resistant or perennial food crops.

Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.

You’re never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

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.

Water’s never clumsy.

Obviously Tesla is about helping solve the consumption of energy in a sustainable manner, but you need the production of energy in a sustainable manner.

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.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

In just a few hundred years, we will have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells if we want to continue to grow our energy usage.

We should remember that there are nations which meet more than 30 to 60% of their power requirements through the nuclear power system.

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

We’re one of the only animals in the world that don’t really think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals, and we must respect our fellow animals.

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.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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.

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

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

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.

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.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

I have a garden in my backyard that’s completely organic, which I’m very proud of.

When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

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

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.

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

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

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.

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.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

I’m a golfer, and what are the two sports you can do till you drop? Golf and surfing. They’re great for you limber-wise, they’re great for you health-wise, and they put you in sweet locations.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

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.

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

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

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.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.