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.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Gays are some of the nicest, kindest, most loving people in the world.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

I am odd-looking. I sometimes think I look like a funny Muppet.

We’re one of the only animals in the world that don’t really think of ourselves as animals, but we are animals, and we must respect our fellow animals.

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.

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

I feel like the way I was raised was to be able to see through all the titles in this world – from religion to race.

Nature is not human hearted.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

I love the sea.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

We don’t want two-tier people in America. Those who are legal but not citizens, and citizens.

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.

I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it’s the most aspirational diet because it’s so easy. It’s quite simple, the cooking I do.

The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country – I know, because I am one of them.

A lot of Jews are great friends of mine.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepts blacks in the top ten percent of students, but at MIT this puts them in the bottom ten percent of the class.

There is no scriptural basis for segregation.

Me only have one ambition, y’know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together – black, white, Chinese, everyone – that’s all.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

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.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

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.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

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

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus‘ famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

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.

Water’s never clumsy.

You have your ideology and I have mine.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Football fans share a universal language that cuts across many cultures and many personality types. A serious football fan is never alone. We are legion, and football is often the only thing we have in common.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

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