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

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‚Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.

Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, ‚Well, good on you. See you there.‘

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

Adversity is the diamond dust Heaven polishes its jewels with.

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.

Long before the awakening of thought on earth, manifestations of cosmic energy must have been produced which have no parallel today.

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

If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever will be born must destroy a world.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

Modern science says: ‚The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.‘ From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

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

Nature does nothing in vain.

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

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

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.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

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 is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

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

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.

We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

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.

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

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.

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

Atheism is so senseless. When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and light. This did not happen by chance.

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

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

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.

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.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.

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.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

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

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