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.

For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

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 still consider myself a little, fat kid from Hawaii.

My father gave me some advice when I was very young – whatever someone tells you in the future, don’t forget Pele is the best.

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.

Nature does nothing in vain.

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed – chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.

I’ve always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It is for the superfluous we sweat.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

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.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

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.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending!

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

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!

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

Every loss of life is terrible.

I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.

Childhood was very nice. The only thing wrong was that I was so introverted, everything became a big deal… ‚Oh, no, here comes the bus. Where am I gonna sit on the bus?‘

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.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

When I was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

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

I do believe that in order to be a successful negotiator that as a diplomat, you have to be able to put yourself into the other person’s shoes. Unless you can understand what is motivating them, you are never going to be able to figure out how to solve a particular problem.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

I come from a poor family, I have seen poverty. The poor need respect, and it begins with cleanliness.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

I am two with nature.

I have no human feelings.

It is hard sometimes to always be at the centre of attention, but when you talk about me you also have to talk about the climate.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

There are people who want to make men’s lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.