Gardening is not a rational act.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.

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

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

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.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

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.

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

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.

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

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

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

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

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

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.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.

I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe. I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

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.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

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

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

Man is by nature a political animal.

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

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

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

Biofuels such as ethanol require enormous amounts of cropland and end up displacing either food crops or natural wilderness, neither of which is good.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

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!

We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.

I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.

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

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.

The universal utilization of water power and its long-distance transmission will supply every household with cheap power and will dispense with the necessity of burning fuel. The struggle for existence being lessened, there should be development along ideal rather than material lines.

If anyone has a vested interest in space solar power, it would have to be me.

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

By stopping flying, you don’t only reduce your own carbon footprint but also that sends a signal to other people around you that the climate crisis is a real thing and that helps push a political movement.

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

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.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.