The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

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.

Walking is man’s best medicine.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

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.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

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.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

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.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

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

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

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.

I’m an introvert… I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees, flowers, the sky.

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

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.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

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

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

Living indoors without fresh air quickly poisons the blood and makes people feel tired and seedy when they don’t know why. For myself, I sleep out of doors in winter as well as summer. I only feel tired or seedy when I have been indoors a lot. I only catch cold when I sleep in a room.

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

We live in a day that nobody’s lived in before: where you can touch more people. The message I’ll speak tonight and the message that I speak at home, people in India will hear. It’s just an amazing day.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

I’ve been waiting over 40 years to come to Cyprus, and it has not disappointed – the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Crossroads of Civilization, and, I might add, a genuine strategic partner to the United States of America.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not.

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

When I walk outside, people have something to say about it.

I love the sea.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

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.

Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilizers of man.

The unnatural, that too is natural.