I’m crepuscular.

Juvenile crime is not naturally born in the boy, but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the individual.

People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

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.

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.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

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

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

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

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.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

I’ve never been reckless – it’s always calculated. I’m mischievous, but I’m calculated.

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

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.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

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

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous.

There are some loony people in this world!

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.

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

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

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

A creep is someone who claims he’s one thing but he’s actually another.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

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

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

A gentleman is never rude except on purpose – I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.