How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

You are a child of the sun, you come from the sun, and that is something true with the Earth also… your relationship with the Earth is so deep, and the Earth is in you and this is something not very difficult, much less difficult then philosophy.

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

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

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.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Each part of my life provided respite from the other and gave me a sense of proportion that classmates trained only on law studies lacked.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I’ve been to those places where it’s ‚poor, pitiful me.‘

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Even if the economy crashes, we will still burn oil.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

Nature does nothing in vain.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

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

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.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.

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.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

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.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

I’ll tell you one thing, since I’m married, single people look absolutely ridiculous to me.

Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

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.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don’t know exactly what’s going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what’s inside of them without being part of them.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

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.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

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