It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Every summer’s mine.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear – and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

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.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Eventually you won’t think of ‚the Internet business.‘ You’ll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn’t clear.

The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

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

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

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

A dark cloud is no sign that the sun has lost his light; and dark black convictions are no arguments that God has laid aside His mercy.

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.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

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

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

Nature hates calculators.

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.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

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.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

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.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.