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.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

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

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.

I’m not looking for sympathy at all.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

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

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

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.

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

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

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.

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.

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

I was raised to be independent.

Nature hates calculators.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

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

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

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

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don’t go there to swim, then those young people don’t have to find out by trial and error.

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

If my businesses or my investments are not profitable, then I don’t eat. And I like to eat.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

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.

Do we not realize that self respect comes with self reliance?

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

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

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

With fools, there is no companionship. Rather than to live with men who are selfish, vain, quarrelsome, and obstinate, let a man walk alone.

‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

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.

I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

Nature abhors annihilation.

‚O sleep, O gentle sleep,‘ I thought gratefully, ‚Nature’s soft nurse!‘

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

Remember: your bosses prefer to keep you in dependent positions. It is in their interest that you do not become self-reliant, and so they will tend to hoard information. You must secretly work against this and seize this information for yourself.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

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.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.