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.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person.

Be as you wish to seem.

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.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.

Confidence… thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

I’ve seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

Tell the children the truth.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

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

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

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

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

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

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 environment is everything that isn’t me.

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Gardening is not a rational act.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

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.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

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!

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

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.

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.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

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

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

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.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.