Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

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

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

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

We are a forward-looking people, and we must have a forward-looking government.

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.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Gentle dullness ever loves a joke.

I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Because in a split second, it’s gone.

To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn’t do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

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.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Africa is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Forever is composed of nows.

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.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

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.

A jug fills drop by drop.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

Nowadays, manners are easy and life is hard.

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

Actually oddly enough, I think my work, the activism, will be forgotten. And I hope it will. Because I hope those problems will have gone away.

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

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

Life is so, so short. Bible says it’s like a vapor.

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.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

It’s every girl’s dream to be a cover girl!

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited – that has music and rhythm and time.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

I love the sea.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

The only way I’d be caught without makeup is if my radio fell in the bathtub while I was taking a bath and electrocuted me and I was in between makeup at home. I hope my husband would slap a little lipstick on me before he took me to the morgue.