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.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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.

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 sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

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

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

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

Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

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.

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

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease.

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

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

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

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

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

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

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

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

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

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

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.