33 quotes
Scottish-American naturalist (1838–1914)
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
"I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine."
on Life
"Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God, and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love."
on Spirituality
"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."
on Nature
"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings."
"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."
"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
on Philosophy
"There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself."
"The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts."
on Environment
"Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it."
on Wisdom
"This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!"
on Death
"The sun shines not on us but in us."
on Self Awareness
"The power of imagination makes us infinite."
on Imagination
"In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools."
on Faith
"There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords."
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
"The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness."
