The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

The brain is wider than the sky.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.

Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds.

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

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

Reality is a sliding door.

If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

Words are loaded pistols.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

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.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge – that is everywhere.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.

Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

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.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

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.