What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Revenge, lust, ambition, pride, and self-will are too often exalted as the gods of man’s idolatry; while holiness, peace, contentment, and humility are viewed as unworthy of a serious thought.

All art is but imitation of nature.

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?

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

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

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

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

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.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

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

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.

The two powers which in my opinion constitute a wise man are those of bearing and forbearing.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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

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?

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

I am against nature. I don’t dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can’t touch with decay.

The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

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

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

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

As the poet said, ‚Only God can make a tree,‘ probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

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

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.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

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.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

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.

‚O sleep, O gentle sleep,‘ I thought gratefully, ‚Nature’s soft nurse!‘

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

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

Man is by nature a political animal.

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.

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.

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.

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.