If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he’s going to get sick on it.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Man never thinks himself happy, but when he enjoys those things which others want or desire.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

Nature is not human hearted.

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.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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

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 don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

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.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

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.‘

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

I would be stupid not to be on my own side. But I’m a human being, too. And I’m on the side of human beings, rather than on the side of crocodiles.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

Death wasn’t part of God’s original plan for humanity, and the Bible calls death an enemy – the last enemy to be destroyed.

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.