Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

I am two with nature.

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

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

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.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

The earth laughs in flowers.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

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.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.

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.

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

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

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.

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

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

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

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.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

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.

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.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Nature hates calculators.

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

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.

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.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

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.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

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

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.