To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

Gardening is not a rational act.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.

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.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

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

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

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

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

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

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

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

See that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

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

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

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.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

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

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

Nature does nothing in vain.