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

Perhaps nature is our best assurance of immortality.

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.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

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.

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.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

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.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

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.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

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

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

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

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.

Nature has always had more force than education.

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

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.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

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

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

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

Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

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.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

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.

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

I am two with nature.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

I’m crepuscular.

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

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory.

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

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.

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.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

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

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Nature hates calculators.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.