It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

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.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

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.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

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

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

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

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

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.

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.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

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.

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.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

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

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

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

Time discovers truth.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

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.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

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.

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

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

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

Truth is a deep kindness that teaches us to be content in our everyday life and share with the people the same happiness.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

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

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.