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

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.

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

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.

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

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

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.

I grew up in an environment where being polite was taken as a weakness. So I just fought everybody.

I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

Water is my drink.

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

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

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

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

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.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

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

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.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

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.

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

You shall, I question not, find a way to the top if you diligently seek for it; for nature hath placed nothing so high that it is out of the reach of industry and valor.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

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.

He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.

Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.

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.

Water is the softest of all things, yet it is the most powerful. The ocean patiently allows all things to flow into it. It is always flexible. The Tao is not about grasping, but allowing, like water.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Much of India that we dream of still lies ahead of us: housing, power, water and sanitation for all; bank accounts and insurance for every citizen; connected and prosperous villages; and, smart and sustainable cities.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

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.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.

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

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents. Primarily because of the activism and the injection of working at the Carter Center, and in international affairs, and to some degree, domestic affairs, on energy conservation, on environment, and things of that kind.