Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

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.

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

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Nature is wont to hide herself.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

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

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

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

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

We are rarely proud when we are alone.

One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.

I love the sea.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

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

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

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

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

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

True Scouts are the best friends of animals, for from living in the woods and wilds, and practising observation and tracking, they get to know more than other people about the ways and habits of birds and animals, and therefore they understand them and are more in sympathy with them.

The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see.

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

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.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

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

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

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.

I’d like to be the last person alive in the world! Yes, I’d like to know what happens.

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.

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

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

I’m an introvert… I love being by myself, love being outdoors, love taking a long walk with my dogs and looking at the trees, flowers, the sky.

I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.

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.

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

I am two with nature.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

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?

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

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.

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