“In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.”

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.

One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.

So also there are tides and floods in the affairs of men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds, but in others they overmaster everything.

The soft light of morning falls upon ripening forests of oak and elm, walnut and hickory, and all Nature is thoughtful and calm.

It seems supernatural, but only because it is not understood.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.

As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.

The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.

You plant the gospel. You don’t plant churches.

It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.

The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.

Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.

And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting.

The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible.