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

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Even Gaddafi’s adversaries assure us that he stood out for his intelligence as a student; he was expelled from high-school for his anti-monarchic activities. He managed to enroll in another high-school and later graduated in law at the University of Benghazi at the age of 21.

The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.

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

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

I have rules for a lot of areas of my life. Love is not going to be one of them.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

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

Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

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.

Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.

The worst evil of disregard for some law is that it destroys respect for all law.

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

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!

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

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you’ll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

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.

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

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

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.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.

The safety of the people shall be the highest law.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

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

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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 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 abhors annihilation.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

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

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

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

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.