“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.

Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.

Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

Few places in this world are more dangerous than home.

All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world’s wildernesses I first should wander.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.

Go where we will, all the world over, we seem to have been there before.

Yet through all this stress the forest is maintained in marvelous beauty.

Night is coming on and I am filled with indescribable loneliness. Felt feverish; bathed in a black, silent stream.

The power of imagination makes us infinite.

Going to the mountains is going home.

The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness, and the nearer our friends.

It is always interesting to see people in dead earnest, from whatever cause, and earthquakes make everybody earnest.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

I never saw a discontented tree.

Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.

I have often endeavoured to view the circulation of the blood in terrestrial animals, but without success, by reason that no parts of their bodies were sufficiently transparent.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

I bought a box of animal crackers, but there was nothing inside. They’d eaten each other.

Stones grow, plants grow, and live, animals grow live and feel.

A bird in The Strand is worth two in Shepherds Bush.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.