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

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

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.

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.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

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.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

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

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?

Being no bigot myself to any mode of worship, I am disposed to endulge the professors of Christianity in the church, that road to heaven which to them shall seem the most direct plainest easiest and least liable to exception.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

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.

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

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Nature does nothing in vain.

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

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.

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

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

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.

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.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

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.

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

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

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.

Everything for me is sacred, beginning with earth, but also going to things made by man.

First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

I am not going to Heaven because I have preached to great crowds or read the Bible many times. I’m going to Heaven just like the thief on the cross who said in that last moment: ‚Lord, remember me.‘

The wheel is come full circle.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

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.

Time destroys the speculation of men, but it confirms nature.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

I’m going to Heaven just like the thief on the cross who said in that last moment: ‚Lord, remember me.‘

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

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.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

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

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.