Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

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.

God has already done everything He’s going to do. The ball is now in your court. If you want success, if you want wisdom, if you want to be prosperous and healthy, you’re going to have to do more than meditate and believe; you must boldly declare words of faith and victory over yourself and your family.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can’t fly home.

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

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 never go anywhere. I do sketches and make phone calls, and people visit. It’s more fun to come to Paris.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‚Bye!‘

On vacations: We hit the sunny beaches where we occupy ourselves keeping the sun off our skin, the saltwater off our bodies, and the sand out of our belongings.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that’s because I’m doing it wrong.

Fatigue is the best pillow.

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

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

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.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any.

I’m crepuscular.

I hope to play until I’m, like, 38 or something, and that’s a lot of years in the game and a lot of travel and a lot of sacrifice on my family’s part.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

If investments in banks fall, it is a tragedy, and people say, ‚What are we going to do?‘ but if people die of hunger, have nothing to eat or suffer from poor health, that’s nothing.

Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health and is as friendly to the mind as to the body.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

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.

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?

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

I want to lose weight because I want to be focused, meaning healthy.

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.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.

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

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Sleep is the best meditation.

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.

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.

I became a beach bum.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

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.