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

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

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

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

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

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.

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

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

I like a man who grins when he fights.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

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.

For greed all nature is too little.

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.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

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

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

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.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

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.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

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.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

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

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Nature has always had more force than education.

Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

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

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Water’s never clumsy.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.