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 do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

I’ve arrived at the place if I’m not taking a career risk, I’m not happy. If I’m scared, then I know I’m being challenged.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

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

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

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.

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.

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.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

Everything we touch in our daily lives, including our body, is a miracle. By putting the kingdom of god in the right place, it shows us it is possible to live happily right here, right now.

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

The choicest pleasures of life lie within the ring of moderation.

I’ve run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people’s support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

Human beings will be happier – not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.

Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Exploration by real people inspires us.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

Africa is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other is to let her have it.

At the beginning when the child is coming, people worry the child may be deformed. When a healthy boy or child comes, people are very happy for a short moment.

I listen to these comparisons with Cristiano Ronaldo, I’ll be happy and then forget it in five seconds.

It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

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.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‚Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.‘

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

You learn a lot from traveling around.

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

Laughter heals all wounds, and that’s one thing that everybody shares. No matter what you’re going through, it makes you forget about your problems. I think the world should keep laughing.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

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.

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.