All quotes

Nowhere will you see the majestic operations of nature more clearly revealed beside the frailest, most gentle and peaceful things.

After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position on the mountains by this pine-music alone.

Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.

For we never can make anything our own except that which is truly related to us.

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is, that Nature tyrannizes over our works.

The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

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.

Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience

The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature.

Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

The dullest eye in the world must surely be quickened by such trees as these.

But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.

Clumsy indeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left.