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

The unnatural, that too is natural.

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.

Walking is man’s best medicine.

Man is by nature a political animal.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

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?

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

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.

They might not need me; but they might. I’ll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

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.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Water’s never clumsy.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

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

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

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.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

I love the sea.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

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.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

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

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

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

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.