We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity.

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

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

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

Our necessities never equal our wants.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.

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.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

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

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

I am two with nature.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

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

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

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

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.

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.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men.

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.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

That we must all die, we always knew; I wish I had remembered it sooner.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

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.

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

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

I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I can still tie a mean bowline knot on just about anything in less than 10 seconds.

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

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

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.