The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
Yet how hard most people work for mere dust and ashes and care, taking no thought of growing in knowledge and grace, never having time to get in sight of their own ignorance.
Keep in view the common good of the people for all time.
Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light – a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.
What a psalm the storm was singing, and how fresh the smell of the washed earth and leaves, and how sweet the still small voices of the storm!
Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society...
Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!
When a man plants a tree, he plants himself.
I am often asked if I am not lonely on my solitary excursions. It seems so self-evident that one cannot be lonesome where everything is wild and beautiful and busy and steeped with God that the question is hard to answer.
Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.
In the woods is perpetual youth.
What is worthwhile in life? I think it is worth living and dreaming. If you don’t you may be dead anyhow – inside.
Raindrops blossom brilliantly in the rainbow, and change to flowers in the sod, but snow comes in full flower direct from the dark, frozen sky.
They tell us that plants are not like man immortal, but are perishable-soul -less. I think that is something that we know exactly nothing about.
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.
Of all the fire mountains which like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.
It may not be easy, life isn’t easy, but dreams keep you alive.
All wilderness seems to be full of tricks and plans to drive and draw us up into God’s light.
Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place.