Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

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.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

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

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

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.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

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.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

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.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

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

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

I’ve written all my songs on every single one of my records, and that’s what’s been fun about looking back.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

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.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

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

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

As in nature, all is ebb and tide, all is wave motion, so it seems that in all branches of industry, alternating currents – electric wave motion – will have the sway.

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

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

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?