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.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.

Most people already know what they’re doing wrong. When I get them to church I want to tell them that you can change.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

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

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself. This is neither easy nor natural, but it is essential.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

I have been ever of opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

Language is wine upon the lips.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

It is wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Men want to make women happy.

Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It’s a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door.

Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Victory is a fleeting thing in the gambling business. Today’s winners are tomorrow’s blinking toads, dumb beasts with no hope.

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, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

I’m not the same man I used to be, I’m not out hell-raising, stuff like that. I am a changed man.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

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

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

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.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

There are many men who are forgotten, who are despised, and who are trampled on by their fellows, but there never was a man who was so despised as the everlasting God has been!

I was definitely very much a country boy.