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.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

People have me pinned as a shark or a predator in some way, and in no way am I that. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. I want to defend people. I want to help people.

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

When we believe the best of people, we let go of each thing they do that is hurtful to us. And we choose to think things like, ‚I don’t believe they meant to hurt me.‘ ‚Maybe they’re having a bad day or don’t feel well.‘ ‚They probably don’t even realize how they sound.‘

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

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?

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

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.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense.

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

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

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

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

I am two with nature.

I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.

Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

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

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.

My mom’s one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

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

Maleficent has suffered abuse in the past, and there’s a reason why she is now as furious as she is. And I think that children who have been outcast and abused in any way will relate to her. There’s a beautiful side to her; she’s not just a dark person. She has all these facets. And that is interesting.

My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that’s all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn’t Mama. Now I’ve bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.

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.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‚If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?‘ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‚If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?‘

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

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.