Animals

362 quotes

Quotes

Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that's the real way to learn to understand art.

Vincent van Gogh

Trees are living symbols of peace and hope. A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky.

Wangari Maathai

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

Carl Sagan

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads The wind is passing by.

Christina Rossetti

If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds.

Wilbur Wright

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

Rachel Carson

The sun made the leaves transparent—there was a fragrance, a freshness—the birds sang. I was overcome by it.

Hans Christian Andersen

Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.

Orville Wright

Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.

Victor Hugo

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds.

Antonín Dvořák

I feel a genuine interest in the animals themselves, because they are real animals and not caricatures of men.

Helen Keller

A violent wind does not outlast the morning; a squall of rain does not outlast the day. Such is the course of Nature.

Lao Tzu

The sun gives spirit and life to plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.

Leonardo da Vinci

The hills are like shouts of children who raise their arms, trying to catch stars.

Rabindranath Tagore

I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life.

Luther Burbank

No good water comes from a muddy spring. No sweet fruit comes from a bitter seed.

José Rizal

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Oscar Wilde

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Marie Curie

Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

Alexander von Humboldt

Nature is always beautiful. We need only to understand what she shows us.

Auguste Rodin

My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature.

Jane Goodall

If you could see the earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more splendid than the moon.

Galileo Galilei

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

John Muir

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.

Charles Dickens

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

Matsuo Bashō

I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.

L.M. Montgomery

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.

Aesop

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Henry David Thoreau

Don't count your chickens before they hatch.English proverb

Every day above earth is a good day.

Ernest Hemingway

All art is but imitation of nature.

Seneca

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.

James Herriot

The early bird catches the worm.English proverb

Nature makes nothing in vain.

Aristotle

Even monkeys fall from trees.Japanese proverb

Water is thus facile and adaptive, that makes the wild more wild, while it enhances culture and art.John Burroughs

So trustful are the doves, the squirrels, the birds of the branches, and the creatures of the field.Richard Jefferies

Sweetly the greenfinches were calling in the trees: afar the voice of the cuckoo came over the oaks.Richard Jefferies

The writing of the book was only a second and finer enjoyment of my holiday in the fields or woods.John Burroughs

All the songs of the spring and summer appear to be floating, softened and refined, in the upper air.John Burroughs

He gives a habitable air to the forest, and one feels as if the rightful occupant was really at home.John Burroughs

Let us not look at ourselves but onwards, and take strength from the leaf and the signs of the field.Richard Jefferies

The woods where I do not find him seem to want something, as if suffering from some neglect of Nature.John Burroughs

These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty.Richard Jefferies

The winter wren is another marvelous songster, in speaking of whom it is difficult to avoid superlatives.John Burroughs

Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun.Richard Jefferies

Does this reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind?Richard Jefferies

Creamy honeysuckle on the hedge around the cornfield, buds of wild rose everywhere, but no sweet petal yet.Richard Jefferies

May is the transition month, and exists to connect April and June, the root with the flower.John Burroughs

When he had flown far down the mountain-side, the breeze still brought me his finest notes.John Burroughs

The fervour of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of earth.Richard Jefferies

Besides the singing and calling, there is a peculiar sound which is only heard in summer.Richard Jefferies

As I write them, so these things come—not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass.Richard Jefferies

So that the songs of the summer birds are as ceaseless as the sound of the waterfall which plays day and night.Richard Jefferies

The new-mown hay is scented yet more sweetly in the evening—of a summer's eve it is always too soon to go home.Richard Jefferies

Steeped in flower and pollen to the music of bees and birds, the stream of the atmosphere became a living thing.Richard Jefferies

A butterfly comes and stays on a leaf—a leaf much warmed by the sun—and shuts his wings.Richard Jefferies

That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!Richard Jefferies

The sun is just past the meridian, and the afternoon chorus is not yet in full tune.John Burroughs

Red sorrel spires—deep drinkers of reddest sun wine—stand the boldest, and in their numbers threaten the buttercups.Richard Jefferies

Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which is theirs!Richard Jefferies

Golden dandelion discs—gold and orange—of a hue more beautiful, I think, than the higher and more visible buttercup.Richard Jefferies

It is never without surprise that I find amid these rugged, savage aspects of nature creatures so fairy and delicate.John Burroughs

From the tiny mottled egg come the wings that by-and-by shall pass the immense sea.Richard Jefferies

Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an untarnished azure.Richard Jefferies

Winter drives a man back upon himself, and tests his powers of self-entertainment.John Burroughs

Autumn arrives, bringing finches, warblers, sparrows, and kinglets from the north.John Burroughs

Without the blackbird, in whose throat the sweetness of the green fields dwells, the days would be only partly summer.Richard Jefferies

Hidden in those bushes and tall grasses, high in the trees and low on the ground, there were the nests of happy birds.Richard Jefferies

Its relative, the phoebe-bird, builds an exquisite nest of moss on the side of some shelving cliff or overhanging rock.John Burroughs

To the dreamy summer haze love gave a deep enchantment, the colours were fairer, the blue more lovely in the lucid sky.Richard Jefferies

Though in shadow the bright light fills it, summer shadows are broadest daylight.Richard Jefferies

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not for every man's greed.

Mahatma Gandhi

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.John Burroughs

This bed of veronica at the foot of the ancient apple has a whole handful of flowers, and yet they do not weary the eye.Richard Jefferies

It is the patient humble-bee that goes down into the forest of the mowing-grass.Richard Jefferies

A bird's song contains a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy, an understanding, between itself and the listener.John Burroughs

The field is scented as though a hundred hives of honey had been emptied on it.Richard Jefferies

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

Buckminster Fuller

Over the woods, hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain.John Burroughs

Winter shows us Matter in its dead form, like the Primary rocks, like granite and basalt—clear but cold and frozen crystal.Richard Jefferies

The remainder of the summer is the carnival of the swallows and flycatchers.John Burroughs

To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature.Richard Jefferies

The may-bloom had fallen, and among the hawthorn boughs were the little green bunches that would feed the redwings in autumn.Richard Jefferies

They did not grow for human admiration: that was not their purpose; that is our affair only—we bring the thought to the tree.Richard Jefferies

The ear seemed the only sense, and to hold dominion over lake and forest.John Burroughs

It is in this marvellous transformation of clods and cold matter into living things that the joy and the hope of summer reside.Richard Jefferies

Such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far enough away in perspective.Richard Jefferies

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Jacques Cousteau

Next to a castle in the air is a dwelling suspended to the slender branch of a tall tree, swayed and rocked forever by the wind.John Burroughs

Humble he is, but wild; always in the field, the wood; always by the banks and thickets; always wild and humming to his flowers.Richard Jefferies

The yellowhammer is the most persistent individually, but I think the blackbirds when listened to are the masters of the fields.Richard Jefferies

The plumage of the cuckoo is a rich glossy brown, and is unrivaled in beauty by any other neutral tint with which I am acquainted.John Burroughs

Green and thick and sappy to the touch, they felt like summer, soft and elastic, as if full of life, mere rushes though they were.Richard Jefferies

Hence it is that a flower is to me so much more than stalk and petals.Richard Jefferies

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

It was lost in the plain of meads—the flowers alone saw its sparkle.Richard Jefferies

The song sparrow, that universal favorite and firstling of the spring, comes before April, and its simple strain gladdens all hearts.John Burroughs

His drum is one of the most welcome and beautiful sounds of spring.John Burroughs

The strength of the earth went up through the leaves into the wind.Richard Jefferies

Like the flowers and grass, the birds were drawn towards the brook.Richard Jefferies

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!

Yuri Gagarin

Go to the sea or climb the mountain, and with the ruggedest and the savagest you will find likewise the fairest and the most delicate.John Burroughs

The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.John Burroughs

This song appeals to the sentiment of the beautiful in me, and suggests a serene religious beatitude as no other sound in nature does.John Burroughs

No bird could paint its house white or red, or add aught for show.John Burroughs

It is one of the most languid, unhurried sounds in all the woods.John Burroughs

The curved moon hung on the sky as the hunter's horn on the wall.Richard Jefferies

I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song in the very air.Richard Jefferies

The sky had that soft luminousness which may often be observed near midnight at this season, and the "large few stars" beamed mildly down.John Burroughs

It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet accordance with the wonderful instrument of nature.Richard Jefferies

Elms are a favourite tree of robins—not the upper branches, but those that grow down the trunk, and are the first to have leaves in spring.Richard Jefferies

Countless rootlets drew up the richness of the earth like miners in the darkness, throwing their petals of yellow ore broadcast above them.Richard Jefferies

The snowbird, or "black chipping-bird," as it is known among the farmers, is the finest architect of any of the ground-builders known to me.John Burroughs

So that my hope becomes as broad as the horizon afar, reiterated by every leaf, sung on every bough, reflected in the gleam of every flower.Richard Jefferies

The life as it were of the meadows seemed to crowd down towards the brook in summer, to reach out and stretch towards the life-giving water.Richard Jefferies

It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest to me.John Burroughs

So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them?Richard Jefferies

Do such books as mine give a wrong impression of Nature, and lead readers to expect more from a walk or a camp in the woods than they usually get?John Burroughs

The soft, mellow flute of the veery fills a place in the chorus of the woods that the song of the vesper sparrow fills in the chorus of the fields.John Burroughs

Before one can finish another begins, like the summer ripples succeeding behind each other, so that the melodious sound merely changes its position.Richard Jefferies

Without the violet all the bluebells and cowslips could not make a spring, and without the blackbird even the nightingale would be but half welcome.Richard Jefferies

But about the middle of the forenoon the wind changed, the fog lifted, and revealed to us the grandest mountain scenery we had beheld on our journey.John Burroughs

A glamour in the heart came back to it again from every flower; as the sunshine was reflected from them so the feeling in the heart returned tenfold.Richard Jefferies

A few nights ago I ascended a mountain to see the world by moonlight, and when near the summit the hermit commenced his evening hymn a few rods from me.John Burroughs

Here is a house that was built, but with such loving care and such beautiful adaptation of the means to the end, that it looks like a product of nature.John Burroughs

When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.Ethiopian proverb

The most noted object was a mammoth pine, apparently the last of a great race, which presided over a cluster of yellow birches, on the side of the mountain.John Burroughs

Consider the grasses and the oaks, the swallows, the sweet blue butterfly—they are one and all a sign and token showing before our eyes earth made into life.Richard Jefferies

The storm passes and the sun comes out, the air is the sweeter and the richer for the rain, like verses with a rhyme; there will be more honey in the flowers.Richard Jefferies

Some of the sparrows still sing, and occasionally across the hot fields, from a tall tree in the edge of the forest, comes the rich note of the scarlet tanager.John Burroughs

The emotions excited by the songs of these thrushes belong to a higher order, springing as they do from our deepest sense of the beauty and harmony of the world.John Burroughs

When twenty rods distant, I hear all along the line of the forest the incessant warble of the red-eyed vireo, cheerful and happy as the merry whistle of a schoolboy.John Burroughs

The white clouds are slowly passing behind the oaks, large puffed clouds, like deliberate loads of hay, leaving little wisps and flecks behind them caught in the sky.Richard Jefferies

To convey a full impression of the intense concentration of Nature in the meadows is very difficult—everything is so utterly oblivious of man's thought and man's heart.Richard Jefferies

Indulging in a brief nap on a rug of club-moss carelessly dropped at the foot of a pine-tree, I woke up to find myself the subject of a discussion of a troop of chickadees.John Burroughs

The ethereal haze lifted the heavy oaks and they were buoyant on the mead, the rugged bark was chastened and no longer rough, each slender flower beneath them again refined.Richard Jefferies

Glance through the gap in the hedge by the oak, and see how concentrated it is—all of it, every blade of grass, and leaf, and flower, and living creature, finch or squirrel.Richard Jefferies

In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding to the music of the thrushes.John Burroughs

From one of the topmost boughs of an elm there fell the song of a willow warbler for awhile; one of the least of birds, he often seeks the highest branches of the highest tree.Richard Jefferies

In visiting vast primitive, far-off woods one naturally expects to find something rare and precious, or something entirely new, but it commonly happens that one is disappointed.John Burroughs

Listening to this strain on the lone mountain, with the full moon just rounded from the horizon, the pomp of your cities and the pride of your civilization seemed trivial and cheap.John Burroughs

My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man's existence.Richard Jefferies

Another April bird, which makes her appearance sometimes earlier and sometimes later than Robin, and whose memory I fondly cherish, is the phoebe-bird, the pioneer of the flycatchers.John Burroughs

By the lake, I met that orchard beauty, the cedar waxwing, spending his vacation in the assumed character of a flycatcher, whose part he performed with great accuracy and deliberation.John Burroughs

The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.Richard Jefferies

It is something to press the pulse of our old mother by mountain lakes and streams, and know what health and vigor are in her veins, and how regardless of observation she deports herself.John Burroughs

Fed thus on the food of the Immortals, the heart opened to the width and depth of the summer—to the broad horizon afar, down to the minutest creature in the grass, up to the highest swallow.Richard Jefferies

A half-hour's march brought us to the locality, and a most delightful one it was,—so hospitable and inviting that all the kindly and beneficent influences of the woods must have abided there.John Burroughs

Summer shows us Matter changing into life, sap rising from the earth through a million tubes, the alchemic power of light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts forth in countless leaves.Richard Jefferies

As the morning sky grows blue, an hour before the sun, up will rise the larks singing and audible now, the cuckoo will recommence, and the swallows will start again on their tireless journey.Richard Jefferies

In adjoining counties, in the same latitude, and equally inland, but possessing a different geological formation and different forest-timber, you will observe quite a different class of birds.John Burroughs

Each kind is repeated a hundred times, the foxtails are succeeded by foxtails, the narrow blades by narrow blades, but never become monotonous; sorrel stands by sorrel, daisy flowers by daisy.Richard Jefferies

It is a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now fast relapsing into the wildness and freedom of nature, and marked by those half-cultivated, half-wild features which birds and boys love.John Burroughs

From the earth they had drawn its moisture, and made the ditch dry; some of the sweetness of the air had entered into their fibres, and the rushes—the common rushes—were full of beautiful summer.Richard Jefferies

The sound of summer is everywhere—in the passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad branching trees, in the grass as it swings; all the myriad particles that together make the summer are in motion.Richard Jefferies

And the sparrow, the lark, and the goldfinch, birds that seem so indigenous to the open fields and so adverse to the woods,—we cannot conceive of their existence in a vast wilderness and without man.John Burroughs

In traversing the shores of this wild, desolate lake, I was conscious of a slight thrill of expectation, as if some secret of Nature might here be revealed, or some rare and unheard-of game disturbed.John Burroughs

Besides the quivering leaf, the swinging grass, the fluttering bird's wing, and the thousand oval membranes which innumerable insects whirl about, a faint resonance seems to come from the very earth itself.Richard Jefferies

Such a medley of notes, snatched from half the songsters of the field and forest, and uttered with the utmost clearness and rapidity, I am sure you cannot hear short of the haunts of the genuine mockingbird.John Burroughs

If my reader thinks he does not get from Nature what I get from her, let me remind him that he can hardly know what he has got till he defines it to himself as I do, and throws about it the witchery of words.John Burroughs

Now and then the faint yeap of some traveling bird would come from the air overhead, or the wings of a bat whisp quickly by, or an owl hoot off in the mountains, giving to the silence and loneliness a tongue.John Burroughs

In the blackbird's melody one note is mine; in the dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is for me, though the motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces have collected the kisses of the morning.Richard Jefferies

On looking at the matter closely, I perceive that most birds, not denominated songsters, have, in the spring, some note or sound or call that hints of a song, and answers imperfectly the end of beauty and art.John Burroughs

The blackbirds do not cease; the note tittered by a blackbird in the oak yonder before it can drop is taken up by a second near the top of the field, and ere it falls is caught by a third on the left-hand side.Richard Jefferies

I have reaped my harvest more in the woods than in the study; what I offer, in fact, is a careful and conscientious record of actual observations and experiences, and is true as it stands written, every word of it.John Burroughs

On another occasion, while walking or rather sauntering in the woods (for I have discovered that one cannot run and read the book of nature), my attention was arrested by a dull hammering, evidently but a few rods off.John Burroughs

In the woods are sounds and voices, and a dumb kind of companionship; one is little more than a walking tree himself; but come upon one of these mountain lakes, and the wildness stands revealed and meets you face to face.John Burroughs

But what has interested me most in Ornithology is the pursuit, the chase, the discovery; that part of it which is akin to hunting, fishing, and wild sports, and which I could carry with me in my eye and ear wherever I went.John Burroughs

Passing through the woods on some clear, still morning in March, while the metallic ring and tension of winter are still in the earth and air, the silence is suddenly broken by long, resonant hammering upon a dry limb or stub.John Burroughs

And yonder bluebird with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,—did he come down out of the heaven on that bright March morning when he told us so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?John Burroughs

The broad repetition of the yellow clover is not to be written; acre upon acre, and not one spot of green, as if all the green had been planed away, leaving only the flowers to which the bees come by the thousand from far and near.Richard Jefferies

If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if the cart-mare in the meadow shook herself, making the earth and air tremble by her with the convulsion of her mighty muscles, these were not sounds, they were the silence itself.Richard Jefferies

The surface of the lake, when we had reached the center, was slightly luminous from the starlight, and the dark, even forest-line that surrounded us, doubled by reflection in the water, presented a broad, unbroken belt of utter blackness.John Burroughs

The rabbits quietly feed on out in the field between the thistles and rushes that so often grow in woodside pastures, quietly hopping to their favourite places, utterly heedless how heavy the echoes may be in the hollows of the wooded hills.Richard Jefferies

In form he is an elegant bird, somewhat slender, his back of a bluish lead-color becoming nearly black on his crown: the under part of his body, from his throat down, is of a light, delicate yellow, with a belt of black dots across his breast.John Burroughs

Most of the common birds literally throng in this idle-wild; and I have met here many of the rarer species, such as the great-crested flycatcher, the solitary warbler, the blue-winged swamp warbler, the worm-eating warbler, the fox sparrow, etc.John Burroughs

Rain or shine, before noon or after, in the deep forest or in the village grove,—when it is too hot for the thrushes or too cold and windy for the warblers,—it is never out of time or place for this little minstrel to indulge his cheerful strain.John Burroughs

As the wind, wandering over the sea, takes from each wave an invisible portion, and brings to those on shore the ethereal essence of ocean, so the air lingering among the woods and hedges—green waves and billows—became full of fine atoms of summer.Richard Jefferies

The bird at first seems a mere wandering voice in the air: one hears its call or carol on some bright March morning, but is uncertain of its source or direction; it falls like a drop of rain when no cloud is visible; one looks and listens, but to no purpose.John Burroughs

Unlike most of his kinsmen, the golden-wing prefers the fields and the borders of the forest to the deeper seclusion of the woods, and hence, contrary to the habit of his tribe, obtains most of his subsistence from the ground, probing it for ants and crickets.John Burroughs

Ever since I entered the woods, even while listening to the lesser songsters, or contemplating the silent forms about me, a strain has reached my ears from out of the depths of the forest that to me is the finest sound in nature,—the song of the hermit thrush.John Burroughs

But the declining sun and the deepening shadows admonish me that this ramble must be brought to a close, even though only the leading characters in this chorus of forty songsters have been described, and only a small portion of the venerable old woods explored.John Burroughs

Though not often consciously recognised, perhaps this is the great pleasure of summer, to watch the earth, the dead particles, resolving themselves into the living case of life, to see the seed-leaf push aside the clod and become by degrees the perfumed flower.Richard Jefferies

The white dust heated by the sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily massed trees, white clouds rolled together in the sky, a footpath opposite lost in the fields, as you might thrust a stick into the grass, tender lime leaves caressing the cheek, and silence.Richard Jefferies

In this song you instantly detect his relationship to the water-wagtail,—erroneously called water-thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good fortune.John Burroughs

The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades—for they would cover acres and square miles if reckoned edge to edge—are drawing their strength from the atmosphere.Richard Jefferies

The thick grasses are bowed, the white florets of the wild parsley are beaten down, the rain hurls itself, and suddenly a fierce blast tears the green oak leaves and whirls them out into the fields; but the humble-bee's home, under moss and matted fibres, remains uninjured.Richard Jefferies

The mockingbird undoubtedly possesses the greatest range of mere talent, the most varied executive ability, and never fails to surprise and delight one anew at each hearing; but being mostly an imitator, he never approaches the serene beauty and sublimity of the hermit thrush.John Burroughs

The swallows dive and chatter about the barn, or squeak and build beneath the eaves; the partridge drums in the fresh sprouting woods; the long, tender note of the meadowlark comes up from the meadow; and at sunset, from every marsh and pond come the ten thousand voices of the hylas.John Burroughs

Mounting by easy flights to the top of the tallest tree, he launches into the air with a sort of suspended, hovering flight, like certain of the finches, and bursts into a perfect ecstasy of song,—clear, ringing, copious, rivaling the goldfinch's in vivacity, and the linnet's in melody.John Burroughs

The other day, passing by a ledge, near the top of a mountain in a singularly desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures, looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for the bird ever since.John Burroughs

Straight go the white petals to the heart; straight the mind's glance goes back to how many other pageants of summer in old times When perchance the sunny days were even more sunny; when the stilly oaks were full of mystery, lurking like the Druid's mistletoe in the midst of their mighty branches.Richard Jefferies

Nature seems to concentrate her energies on the wing, making the safety of a bird a point to be looked after first; and while the body is covered with down, and no signs of feathers are visible, the wing-quills sprout and unfold, and in an incredibly short time the young make fair headway in flying.John Burroughs

We little suspect, when we walk in the woods, whose privacy we are intruding upon,—what rare and elegant visitants from Mexico, from central and South America, and from the islands of the sea, are holding their reunions in the branches over our heads, or pursuing their pleasure on the ground before us.John Burroughs

The specked Canada is a very superior warbler, having a lively, animated strain, reminding you of certain parts of the canary's, though quite broken and incomplete; the bird, the while, hopping amid the branches with increased liveliness, and indulging in fine sibilant chirps, too happy to keep silent.John Burroughs

Heavy moths burring at the edge of the copse; green, and red, and gold flies: gnats, like smoke, around the tree-tops; midges so thick over the brook, as if you could haul a netful; tiny leaping creatures in the grass; bronze beetles across the path; blue dragonflies pondering on cool leaves of water-plantain.Richard Jefferies

I shall not soon forget that perfect June day, when, loitering in a low, ancient hemlock wood, in whose cathedral aisles the coolness and freshness seems perennial, the silence was suddenly broken by a strain so rapid and gushing, and touched with such a wild, sylvan plaintiveness, that I listened in amazement.John Burroughs

So down again from this sun of Spain to woody coverts where the wild hops are blocking every avenue, and green-flowered bryony would fain climb to the trees; where grey-flecked ivy winds spirally about the red rugged bark of pines, where burdocks fight for the footpath, and teazle-heads look over the low hedges.Richard Jefferies

I pass on through the old Barkpeeling, now threading an obscure cow-path or an overgrown wood-road; now clambering over soft and decayed logs, or forcing my way through a network of briers and hazels; now entering a perfect bower of wild cherry, beech, and soft maple; now emerging into a grassy lane, golden with buttercups or white with daisies, or wading waist-deep in the red raspberry-bushes.John Burroughs

Pressing on through the forest, after many adventures with pine-knots, we reached, about the middle of the afternoon, our destination, Nate's Pond,—a pretty sheet of water, lying like a silver mirror in the lap of the mountain, about a mile long and half a mile wide, surrounded by dark forests of balsam, hemlock, and pine, and, like the one we had just passed, a very picture of unbroken solitude.John Burroughs

I've got nature and art and poetry, and if that isn't enough, what is?

Vincent van Gogh

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Carl Sagan

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson

To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg.

Hans Christian Andersen

It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.

Victor Hugo

The highest excellence is like water.

Lao Tzu

Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

Rabindranath Tagore

The glittering stars fill us with joy and inspiration, yet in the canopy of heaven all bodies revolve in mathematical figures.

Alexander von Humboldt

I obey nature, I never presume to command her.

Auguste Rodin

Only if we understand, can we care. Only if we care, we will help.

Jane Goodall

There is, in nature, perhaps nothing older than motion.

Galileo Galilei

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

John Muir

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in.

Henry David Thoreau

If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.

Vincent van Gogh

Fishes and plankton, whales and squids, birds and sea turtles, all are linked by unbreakable ties to certain kinds of water.

Rachel Carson

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Lao Tzu

The bird thinks it is an act of kindness to give the fish a lift in the air.

Rabindranath Tagore

A book on nature should produce an impression like nature itself.

Alexander von Humboldt

I wanted to talk to the animals like Dr. Dolittle.

Jane Goodall

Exhilarated with the mountain air, I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy.

John Muir

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Henry David Thoreau

The pet dog suspects the universe for scheming to take its place.

Rabindranath Tagore

And our first pure mountain day, warm, calm, cloudless,—how immeasurable it seems, how serenely wild!

John Muir

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to.

Henry David Thoreau

Yet the upshot of Nature’s method of breeding and teaching seems to lead to excellence of every sort.

John Muir

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature.

Henry David Thoreau

How rich our inheritance in these blessed mountains, the tree pastures into which our eyes are turned!

John Muir

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.

Henry David Thoreau

Never before had I seen so glorious a landscape, so boundless an affluence of sublime mountain beauty.

John Muir

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.

Henry David Thoreau

But most impressive of all is the vast glowing countenance of the wilderness in awful, infinite repose.

John Muir

Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

Henry David Thoreau

But, in spite of enemies, squirrels are happy fellows, forest favorites, types of tireless life.

John Muir

The wild wood covers the virgin mould,—and the same soil is good for men and for trees.

Henry David Thoreau

All are beautiful with smooth definite outlines and curves like those of glacier-polished domes.

John Muir

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Henry David Thoreau

Now the storm is past, and the fresh washed air is full of the essences of the flower gardens and groves.

John Muir

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

Henry David Thoreau

Breeze just enough to sift through the woods and waft fragrance from their thousand fountains.

John Muir

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

Henry David Thoreau

Mountains of the sky, solid-looking, finely sculptured, their richly varied topography wonderfully defined.

John Muir

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

Henry David Thoreau

How fresh the woods are and calm after the last films of clouds have been wiped from the sky!

John Muir

From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

Henry David Thoreau

A calm dawn, yellow and purple, then floods of sun-gold, making every thing tingle and glow.

John Muir

I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood.

Henry David Thoreau

How true and substantial is this shadow beauty, and with what sublime extravagance is beauty thus multiplied!

John Muir

How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us!

Henry David Thoreau

The perfection of beauty in these lilies of the wilderness is a never-ending source of admiration and wonder.

John Muir

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness.

Henry David Thoreau

How deathlike is sleep in this mountain air, and quick the awakening into newness of life!

John Muir

We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

Henry David Thoreau

In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one’s body is all one tingling palate.

John Muir

Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage.

Henry David Thoreau

And the stars, the everlasting sky lilies, how bright they are now that we have climbed above the lowland dust!

John Muir

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down.

Henry David Thoreau

The daylight fades, the color spell is broken, and the forest breathes free in the night breeze beneath the stars.

John Muir

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them.

Henry David Thoreau

Lake Hoffman lies shimmering beneath my feet, mountain pines around its shining rim.

John Muir

Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?

Henry David Thoreau

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest!

John Muir

The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Henry David Thoreau

These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.

John Muir

I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted.

Henry David Thoreau

No longing for anything now or hereafter as we go home into the mountain’s heart.

John Muir

As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens.

Henry David Thoreau

The great sun-gold noons, the alabaster cloud-mountains, the landscape beaming with consciousness like the face of a god.

John Muir

It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.

Henry David Thoreau

Everything kept in joyful rhythmic motion in the pulses of Nature’s big heart.

John Muir

Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.

Henry David Thoreau

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky gardens amid so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains!

John Muir

There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda ( Cassandra calyculata ) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface.

Henry David Thoreau

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

John Muir

The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

Henry David Thoreau

The two pines also are brave storm-enduring trees, the mountain pine ( Pinus monticola ) and the dwarf pine ( Pinus albicaulis ).

John Muir

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would migrate—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

Henry David Thoreau

The serenity of this mountain weather in the spring, just when Nature’s pulses are beating highest, is one of its greatest charms.

John Muir

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the west or in the jungles of the east.

Henry David Thoreau

Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them.

John Muir

Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.

Henry David Thoreau

Climbing these trees on a sunny day to visit the growing cones and to gaze over the tops of the forest is one of my best enjoyments.

John Muir

It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time.

Henry David Thoreau

Though only a sheep camp, this grand mountain hollow is home, sweet home, every day growing sweeter, and I shall be sorry to leave it.

John Muir

A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.

Henry David Thoreau

Lying beneath the firs, it is glorious to see them dipping their spires in the starry sky, the sky like one vast lily meadow in bloom!

John Muir

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

Henry David Thoreau

Another midday cloudland, displaying power and beauty that one never wearies in beholding, but hopelessly unsketchable and untellable.

John Muir

But, above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward.

Henry David Thoreau

The night breeze is cool, for all day we have been climbing into the upper sky, the home of the cloud mountains we so long have admired.

John Muir

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

Down the long mountain-slopes the sunbeams pour, gilding the awakening pines, cheering every needle, filling every living thing with joy.

John Muir

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.

Henry David Thoreau

The air beyond the flock range, full of the essences of the woods, is growing sweeter and more fragrant from day to day, like ripening fruit.

John Muir

It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens.

Henry David Thoreau

The clouds of noon on the high Sierra seem yet more marvelously, indescribably beautiful from day to day as one becomes more wakeful to see them.

John Muir

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

Henry David Thoreau

Glorious days I’ll have sketching, pressing plants, studying the wonderful topography and the wild animals, our happy fellow mortals and neighbors.

John Muir

He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

Henry David Thoreau

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship.

John Muir

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side.

Henry David Thoreau

We passed a number of charming garden-like meadows lying on top of the divide or hanging like ribbons down its sides, imbedded in the glorious forest.

John Muir

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn.

Henry David Thoreau

So extravagant is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert.

John Muir

There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests.

Henry David Thoreau

A grand cloudland and five-minute shower, refreshing the blessed wilderness, already so fragrant and fresh, steeping the black meadow mold and dead leaves like tea.

John Muir

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.

Henry David Thoreau

The whole landscape glows like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm, and the blue sky, pale around the horizon, bends peacefully down over all like one vast flower.

John Muir

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow.

Henry David Thoreau

Now the storm is over, the sky is clear, the last rolling thunder-wave is spent on the peaks, and where are the raindrops now—what has become of all the shining throng?

John Muir

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

Henry David Thoreau

The horizon is bounded and adorned by a spiry wall of pines, every tree harmoniously related to every other; definite symbols, divine hieroglyphics written with sunbeams.

John Muir

But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds.

Henry David Thoreau

Have greatly enjoyed all this huge day, sauntering and seeing, steeping in the mountain influences, sketching, noting, pressing flowers, drinking ozone and Tamarack water.

John Muir

I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas.

Henry David Thoreau

Near camp the trees arch over from bank to bank, making a leafy tunnel full of soft subdued light, through which the young river sings and shines like a happy living creature.

John Muir

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump.

Henry David Thoreau

Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever.

John Muir

I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.

Henry David Thoreau

The stream flowing past the camp through ferns and lilies and alders makes sweet music to the ear, but the pines marshaled around the edge of the sky make a yet sweeter music to the eye.

John Muir

Some of the external beauty is always in sight, enough to keep every fibre of us tingling, and this we are able to gloriously enjoy though the methods of its creation may lie beyond our ken.

John Muir

Sauntered up the meadow about sundown, out of sight of camp and sheep and all human mark, into the deep peace of the solemn old woods, everything glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm.

John Muir

After the excursion to Mount Hoffman I had seen a complete cross-section of the Sierra forest, and I find that Abies magnifica is the most symmetrical tree of all the noble coniferous company.

John Muir

And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens.

John Muir

Far up the Pilot Peak Ridge the radiant host of trees stand hushed and thoughtful, receiving the Sun’s good-night, as solemn and impressive a leave-taking as if sun and trees were to meet no more.

John Muir

Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains—beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

John Muir

And so this memorable month ends, a stream of beauty unmeasured, no more to be sectioned off by almanac arithmetic than sun-radiance or the currents of seas and rivers—a peaceful, joyful stream of beauty.

John Muir

Long will it be ere these marks are effaced, though Nature is doing what she can, replanting, gardening, sweeping away old dams and flumes, leveling gravel and boulder piles, patiently trying to heal every raw scar.

John Muir

One may fancy the clouds themselves are plants, springing up in the sky-fields at the call of the sun, growing in beauty until they reach their prime, scattering rain and hail like berries and seeds, then wilting and dying.

John Muir

The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain,—a magic wand in Nature’s hand,—every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this?

John Muir

Cloudland to-day is only a solitary white mountain; but it is so enriched with sunshine and shade, the tones of color on its big domed head and bossy outbulging ridges, and in the hollows and ravines between them, are ineffably fine.

John Muir

Wonderful the beauty, strength, and graceful movements of animals in wildernesses, cared for by Nature only, when our experience with domestic animals would lead us to fear that all the so-called neglected wild beasts would degenerate.

John Muir

The hemlock ( Tsuga Mertensiana ) is the most beautiful conifer I have ever seen; the branches and also the main axis droop in a singularly graceful way, and the dense foliage covers the delicate, sensitive, swaying branchlets all around.

John Muir

Magnificent white cumuli appeared about noon above the Yosemite region,—floating fountains refreshing the glorious wilderness,—sky mountains in whose pearly hills and dales the streams take their rise,—blessing with cooling shadows and rain.

John Muir

Beds of azure daisies smile confidingly in moist hollows, and along the banks of small rills, with several species of eriogonum, silky-leaved ivesia, pentstemon, orthocarpus, and patches of Primula suffruticosa , a beautiful shrubby species.

John Muir

Toward sunset, enjoyed a fine run to camp, down the long south slopes, across ridges and ravines, gardens and avalanche gaps, through the firs and chaparral, enjoying wild excitement and excess of strength, and so ends a day that will never end.

John Muir

Grand white cloud mountains and domes created about noon as usual, ridges and ranges of endless variety, as if Nature dearly loved this sort of work, doing it again and again nearly every day with infinite industry, and producing beauty that never palls.

John Muir

What pains are taken to keep this wilderness in health,—showers of snow, showers of rain, showers of dew, floods of light, floods of invisible vapor, clouds, winds, all sorts of weather, interaction of plant on plant, animal on animal, etc., beyond thought!

John Muir

Nearly all the upper basin of the Merced was displayed, with its sublime domes and cañons, dark upsweeping forests, and glorious array of white peaks deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into our flesh and bones like heat rays from fire.

John Muir

How fiercely, devoutly wild is Nature in the midst of her beauty-loving tenderness!—painting lilies, watering them, caressing them with gentle hand, going from flower to flower like a gardener while building rock mountains and cloud mountains full of lightning and rain.

John Muir

Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun,—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.

John Muir

A Douglas squirrel, peppery, pungent autocrat of the woods, is barking overhead this morning, and the small forest birds, so seldom seen when one travels noisily, are out on sunny branches along the edge of the meadow getting warm, taking a sun bath and dew bath—a fine sight.

John Muir

Never in all my travels have I found anything more truly novel and interesting than these midday mountains of the sky, their fine tones of color, majestic visible growth, and ever-changing scenery and general effects, though mostly as well let alone as far as description goes.

John Muir

Happy the showers that fall on so fair a wilderness,—scarce a single drop can fail to find a beautiful spot,—on the tops of the peaks, on the shining glacier pavements, on the great smooth domes, on forests and gardens and brushy moraines, plashing, glinting, pattering, laving.

John Muir

Butterflies colored like the flowers waver above them in wonderful profusion, and many other beautiful winged people, numbered and known and loved only by the Lord, are waltzing together high over head, seemingly in pure play and hilarious enjoyment of their little sparks of life.

John Muir

The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling, keen lance rays of every color flashing, sparkling in glorious abundance, joining the plants in their fine, brave beauty-work—every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.

John Muir

Our way is still along the Merced and Tuolumne divide, the streams on our right going to swell the songful Yosemite River, those on our left to the songful Tuolumne, slipping through sunny carex and lily meadows, and breaking into song down a thousand ravines almost as soon as they are born.

John Muir

We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them, hard or soft, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty.

John Muir

And the dawns and sunrises and sundowns of these mountain days,—the rose light creeping higher among the stars, changing to daffodil yellow, the level beams bursting forth, streaming across the ridges, touching pine after pine, awakening and warming all the mighty host to do gladly their shining day’s work.

John Muir

The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms.

John Muir

The pale rose and purple sky changing softly to daffodil yellow and white, sunbeams pouring through the passes between the peaks and over the Yosemite domes, making their edges burn; the silver firs in the middle ground catching the glow on their spiry tops, and our camp grove fills and thrills with the glorious light.

John Muir

Fine calm morning; air tense and clear; not the slightest breeze astir; everything shining, the rocks with wet crystals, the plants with dew, each receiving its portion of irised dewdrops and sunshine like living creatures getting their breakfast, their dew manna coming down from the starry sky like swarms of smaller stars.

John Muir

How deeply with beauty is beauty overlaid! the ground covered with crystals, the crystals with mosses and lichens and low-spreading grasses and flowers, these with larger plants leaf over leaf with ever-changing color and form, the broad palms of the firs outspread over these, the azure dome over all like a bell-flower, and star above star.

John Muir

Also a few junipers ( Juniperus occidentalis ), short and stout, with bright cinnamon-colored bark and gray foliage, standing alone mostly, on the sun-beaten pavement, safe from fire, clinging by slight joints,—a sturdy storm-enduring mountaineer of a tree, living on sunshine and snow, maintaining tough health on this diet for perhaps more than a thousand years.

John Muir

The sculpture of the landscape is as striking in its main lines as in its lavish richness of detail; a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds without leaving a single rocky angle exposed, as if the delicate fluting and ridging fashioned out of metamorphic slates had been carefully sandpapered.

John Muir

From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down into the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them.

John Muir

After dark, when the camp was at rest, I groped my way back to the altar boulder and passed the night on it,—above the water, beneath the leaves and stars,—everything still more impressive than by day, the fall seen dimly white, singing Nature’s old love song with solemn enthusiasm, while the stars peering through the leaf-roof seemed to join in the white water’s song.

John Muir

After gaining the open summit of this first bench, feeling the natural exhilaration due to the slight elevation of a thousand feet or so, and the hopes excited concerning the outlook to be obtained, a magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came full in sight—a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices.

John Muir

A more tuneful set of streams surely nowhere exists, or more sparkling crystal pure, now gliding with tinkling whisper, now with merry dimpling rush, in and out through sunshine and shade, shimmering in pools, uniting their currents, bouncing, dancing from form to form over cliffs and inclines, ever more beautiful the farther they go until they pour into the main glacial rivers.

John Muir

And the Pilot Peak Ridge, its long withdrawing slopes gracefully modeled and braided, reaching from climate to climate, feathered with trees that are the kings of their race, their ranks nobly marshaled to view, spire above spire, crown above crown, waving their long, leafy arms, tossing their cones like ringing bells—blessed sun-fed mountaineers rejoicing in their strength, every tree tuneful, a harp for the winds and the sun.

John Muir