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

Man and animals are in reality vehicles and conduits of food, tombs of animals, hostels of Death, coverings that consume, deriving life by the death of others.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

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

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.

I think we’ve taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don’t stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and – for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

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.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn’t even know you’d done.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

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

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

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

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

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

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

My one big regret is that I didn’t play on for ten more years.

Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn’t come from a store.

Before 1915, space and time were thought of as a fixed arena in which events took place, but which was not affected by what happened in it. Space and time are now dynamic quantities… space and time not only affect but are also affected by everything that happens in the universe.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

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

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

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

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

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.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

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.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

That’s the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God – so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true… Hell, don’t pose me that one.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

Water’s never clumsy.

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

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

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