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

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

Sponges grow in the ocean. That just kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

If you desire many things, many things will seem few.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

Society is at odds with itself.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

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

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

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

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.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

I have spent many years of my life in opposition, and I rather like the role.

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

In time of war the laws are silent.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierra in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

What one fool can understand, another can.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.