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

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

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

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

The earth laughs in flowers.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

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

Nature is wont to hide herself.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

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

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.

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

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

For greed all nature is too little.

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.

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

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

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic – I use this metaphor a lot but I’ll use it again – it’s like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries – it’s just what happens with this being, now.

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

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

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.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

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

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

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.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

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

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.

The unnatural, that too is natural.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.