Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

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.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

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

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

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.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

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.

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.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the ‚Not Me,‘ that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, ‚Nature.‘

If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.

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?

I was definitely very much a country boy.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

‚O sleep, O gentle sleep,‘ I thought gratefully, ‚Nature’s soft nurse!‘

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.

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

I’m crepuscular.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

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

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and difficult task of wise distribution.

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.

Walking is man’s best medicine.

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

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

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

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.

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.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.