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

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

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.

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

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

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

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.

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.

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.

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

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.

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.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

I’m from the generation that had the boys‘ door and the girls‘ door when you went to school, and you got in big trouble if you went in the wrong one.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

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.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

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.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

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

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.

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

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

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

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?

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.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

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.

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

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

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

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

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

Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values, and that includes belief in equality under the law, basic respect for public order, and the right of peaceful protest.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

Law is mind without reason.

If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.

The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game.

From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work – not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.