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.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

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.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

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

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

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

Until I was a teenager, I used red pokeberries for lipstick and a burnt matchstick for eyeliner. I used honeysuckle for perfume.

My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.

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

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.

We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.

I think it matters whether someone has a good heart.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

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.

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.

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.

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain – a magic wand in Nature’s hand – every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

We’re a blip in the existence of the universe, and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

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

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.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

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.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

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.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

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

When I was a little boy in school I had to dress up as a bunny and there’s a picture of me with an annoyed face, and when I saw it, I thought I should name myself ‚Bad Bunny.‘

To add value to others, one must first value others.

I feel like I write so that people can think of it as theirs. If my song is exactly about your life right now, then it is – I don’t even want to say that it’s mine, because it’s yours.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years, But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the wars of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.

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.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Anyone who’s looked into a newborn’s innocent eyes should realize how incredible it is to be blessed with a new life.

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

I used to – my earliest memory of waking up with a melody in my head was, you know, 8, 9, 10. I’ve always heard kind of melodies in my head.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

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

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on the outside!

When I was born, that was the music my mother was listening to. Michael Jackson is a third parent to me.

Everyone my age probably grew up listening to the ‚perreos‘ of Plan B.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

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

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.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.

I had a rat-tail when I was younger. I had this nice Bobby Brown fade, with a rat-tail that was long enough to wrap around my face. I used to chew on the end and bite it.

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.

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