“Nature is, above all, profligate.”

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

The world knew you before you knew the world.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.

When the grass turns brown nobody seems to care. It’s just temporary, they say yet I can feel it will stay and stay.

There’s beauty in the silver singing river There’s beauty in the sunrise in the sky But none of these and nothing else can match the beauty That I remember in my true love’s eyes

It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.

Though how nature works is way beyond man’s ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.

From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree; And from the bamboo, of the bamboo.

When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things.