The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Water’s never clumsy.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

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.

I’m crepuscular.

For greed all nature is too little.

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

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.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

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

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

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

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.

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

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 appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

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.

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

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

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.

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.

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

Walking is man’s best medicine.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

I’m definitely a Polaroid camera girl. For me, what I’m really excited about is bringing back the artistry and the nature of Polaroid.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

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.

Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power.

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

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

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

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.