The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

One of the most important concepts of revealed religion is that of a sacred covenant.

I am radically, insanely, nutty in love with Jesus!

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man?

There is no love of life without despair of life.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If you want to grow a giant redwood, you need to make sure the seeds are ok, nurture the sapling, and work out what might potentially stop it from growing all the way along. Anything that breaks it at any point stops that growth.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Nature is not human hearted.

The gods‘ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Prayer is a confession of one’s own unworthiness and weakness.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

‚God‘ is a relative word and has a respect to servants, and ‚Deity‘ is the dominion of God, not over his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the world, but over servants.

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

I always ask God to work through me and let me be a light of some kind and help in this world, so I always pray for that, and I always want to do good.

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.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and someone asked me how was my year, and I said, ‚I honestly think 2011 was the best year of my entire life,‘ and I actually meant it.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion.

The fewer the words, the better the prayer.

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

I mean, Hawaii is beautiful, but the world is full of beautiful places.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

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.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

The true identity theft is not financial. It’s not in cyberspace. It’s spiritual. It’s been taken.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

The most effective prayers are usually the simple prayers.

God doesn’t do things halfway. He goes all out! When God does something, it’s not just barely enough, mediocre or lukewarm.

I can tell you from experience that God’s help and presence in our lives is vital. He is the Author of all true success and everything that is good-without Him, we can do nothing of true value.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.