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

I love the sea.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

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.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

For greed all nature is too little.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

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

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

I didn’t really want to live, so anything that was an investment in time made me angry… but also I just felt sad. When the hopelessness is hurting you, it’s the fixtures and fittings that finish you off.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

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

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

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

I second-guess and overthink and rethink every single thing that I do.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

‚Thursday‘ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

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

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

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

The act of dying is one of the acts of life.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

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

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

I am a generous man, by nature, and far more trusting than I should be. Indeed. The real world is risky territory for people with generosity of spirit. Beware.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

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.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

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.

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.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.

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

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.