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 progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Beauty is the greatest seducer of man.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Older and wiser voices can help you find the right path, if you are only willing to listen.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

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.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

See any detour as an opportunity to experience new things.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

I love to put on lotion. Sometimes I’ll watch TV and go into a lotion trance for an hour. I try to find brands that don’t taste bad in case anyone wants to taste me.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.

I put cocoa butter all over my face and my iconic belly and my arms and legs. Why live rough? Live smooth.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

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

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

I’m constantly trying to find new ways to get my hair out of my face.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

Every time I come to Europe, I’m just as excited as I was my very first time, which was many, many years ago. I love that part of the world, and I especially love the fans.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

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

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

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

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

God doesn’t love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Not being beautiful was the true blessing. Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources. The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.