When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

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 was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

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

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

I am two with nature.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Man is by nature a political animal.

A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

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

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

Nature never breaks her own laws.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

Well, I think that California has had a history of always spending more money than it takes in.

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity.

I think Pebble Beach is kind of a unique place on the planet.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

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.

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

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.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.

The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the truth.

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.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

I believe in that old adage that ‚as goes California, so goes the country.‘

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.

To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

My hair grows and grows; you cannot stop it – that fellow grows, it grows wild.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

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.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

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

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.