Our lives are rounded with a sleep.
The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.
There is no estimating the wit and wisdom concealed and latent in our lower fellow mortals until made manifest by profound experiences; for it is through suffering that dogs as well as saints are developed and made perfect.
A man, in his books, may be said to walk the earth a long time after he is gone.
Tug on anything in nature and you will find it connected to everything else.
To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.
In the beauty and grandeur of individual trees, and in number and variety of species, the Sierra forests surpass all others.
Lizards of every temper, style, and color dwell here, seemingly as happy and companionable as the birds and squirrels.
Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
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.
No wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.
Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?
To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.
Wherever we go in the mountains, we find more than we seek.
Every good thing great and small needs defense.
We all flow from one fountain.
No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons.
God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.
We live with our heels as well as head and most of our pleasure comes in that way.