The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.

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

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

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

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

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions.

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

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.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

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.

The moon and other celestial bodies should be free for exploration and use by all countries. No country should be permitted to advance a claim of sovereignty.

The big message of gospel is that you don’t have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

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.

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.

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.

Nature is not human hearted.

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.

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.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

The problem of evil, that is to say the reconciling of our failures, even the purely physical ones, with creative goodness and creative power, will always remain one of the most disturbing mysteries of the universe for both our hearts and our minds.

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

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.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, whom I call the ‚Lord God.‘

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.