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

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.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

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

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

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

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

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.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

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.

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

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?

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

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.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

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.

If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

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

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

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

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

The Bible says that God has a reason for keeping us here; if He didn’t, He would take us to Heaven far sooner.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

I’m going to let God be the judge of who goes to heaven and hell.

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.

Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.

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

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.

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.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

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.

The moon gravitates towards the earth and by the force of gravity is continually drawn off from a rectilinear motion and retained in its orbit.

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

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

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Is there not some chosen curse, some hidden thunder in the stores of heaven, red with uncommon wrath, to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country’s ruin!

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.