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.

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.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

The economy’s always been the engine for our national security.

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

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

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Global energy security is a vital part of America’s national security.

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.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Al Qaeda is still a threat. We cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything is going to be OK.

The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

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

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

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.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

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

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.

Flowers… are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

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

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

When you’re outside, and everything is highland, it’s like nature has its own sound, and that’s one of my favorite sounds. I really loved sitting still silently outside, in a tree or in a bush, to just think.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

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.

Nature has always had more force than education.

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 is not human hearted.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

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

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it’s a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

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.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

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

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

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.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

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

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