Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

The environment is everything that isn’t me.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

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.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

My life is real.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

In a lot of ways, success is much harder than I thought it would be. I figured that you’d get here and then everything would be happily ever after. But, it’s hard work, almost harder once you’re successful because you’ve got to maintain it.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

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

Study hard so that you can master technology, which allows us to master nature.

We live in an imperfect world, and imperfect people surround us every day.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

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

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

I’m crepuscular.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it’s the most ridiculous concept.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

Vanity is but the surface.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

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

Even paranoids have real enemies.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

I gave ‚em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

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.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.