We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

The traveller has reached the end of the journey!

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

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

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

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.

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.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

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.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

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

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

Ultimately, education in its real sense is the pursuit of truth. It is an endless journey through knowledge and enlightenment.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Knowledge is true opinion.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

He who knows best knows how little he knows.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

A lot of people can’t stand touring but to me it’s like breathing. I do it because I’m driven to do it.

There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

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

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

The book you don’t read won’t help.

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.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.