“Nature teaches more than she preaches.”

Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world.

Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.

Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.

My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.

I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life.

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.

He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.

Man takes root at his feet, and at best, he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it.

To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others, it means what it means to many fortunate human beings – travels in warm climes.

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls.

Large areas of the Gulf have escaped being scraped by trawls, crushed by more than 40,000 miles of pipelines, or displaced by one of 50,000 oil and gas wells drilled since the middle of the 20th century. Some places have been deliberately protected.

People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity.

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.