There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

Laws are silent in time of war.

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

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Water’s never clumsy.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.

I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It’s on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

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.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

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.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

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

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

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.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

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

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.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

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

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

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.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

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, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Silence is the mother of truth.

It was because the chimps are so eye-catching, so like us and teach us so much that my work was recognised worldwide.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

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.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

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.

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.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

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.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

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

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn’t speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn’t speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Nothing on this earth is standing still. It’s either growing or it’s dying. No matter if it’s a tree or a human being.

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 thought the attractions of being an astronaut were actually, not so much the Moon, but flying in a completely new medium.