See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?
Surely all God’s people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play.
Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. The multitude of mixed, novel impressions rapidly piled on one another make only a dreamy, bewildering, swirling blur, most of which is unrememberable.
Quench love, and what is left of a man’s life but the folding of a few jointed bones and square inches of flesh? Who would call that life?
Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one big word of love that we call the world!
Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money – or so little, they are no longer good for themselves.
What wonders lie in every mountain day!
Living artificially in towns, we are sickly, and never come to know ourselves.
Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread.
Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart’s content.
Better to toil blindly, beating every stone in turn for grains of gold, whether they contain any or not, than to lie down in apathetic decay.
Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory...
The moon is looking down into the canyon, and how marvelously the great rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow.
Every atom in creation may be said to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the most intense individuality.
Bread without butter or coffee without milk is an awful calamity, as if everything before being put in our mouth must first be held under a cow.
Wherever a Scotsman goes, here goes Burns. His grand whole, catholic soul squares with the good of all; therefore we find him in everything, everywhere.
The redwood is one of the few conifers that sprout from the stump and roots, and it declares itself willing to begin immediately to repair the damage of the lumberman and also that of the forest-burner.
Man and other civilized animals are the only creatures that ever become dirty.
Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old.