All quotes

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

Death, like birth, is a mystery of nature; the one a compounding of elements, the other a resolution into the same.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Some day the world will understand that, and the little oases on the windy tops of hills will harbor for healing its ailing, house-weary broods.

To be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.

If trees could speak, hundreds of them would say that I had had these soul-emotions under them.

Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all in vain.

Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.

Yahweh, how many are your works! In wisdom, you have made them all. The earth is full of your riches.

I will sing to Yahweh as long as I live. I will sing praise to my God while I have any being.

Let my meditation be sweet to him. I will rejoice in Yahweh.

The heavens declare the glory of God. The expanse shows his handiwork.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Yahweh, my rock, and my redeemer.

Yahweh’s law is perfect, restoring the soul. Yahweh’s covenant is sure, making wise the simple.

Blessed is the one whom you choose and cause to come near, that he may live in your courts. We will be filled with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.

They also who dwell in faraway places are afraid at your wonders. You call the morning’s dawn and the evening with songs of joy.

You visit the earth, and water it. You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide them grain, for so you have ordained it.

By space the Universe encompasses and swallows me as an atom, by thought I encompass it.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Moreover, the many dead trunks that stand like skeletons, never fail to give to these primeval woods a character of solemnity, absent in those of countries long civilized.

Sitting down on a block of granite, it was delightful to watch the various insects and birds as they flew past.

This west coast makes me remember with pleasure the free, unbounded plains of Patagonia; yet, with the true spirit of contradiction, I cannot forget how sublime is the silence of the forest.

Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in.

On this bit of the wild world's stage are theatrical lightning changes of scenes—changes that on most mountains would require ten thousand years or more. It is a place of strange and fleeting landscapes; the earth is ever changing like the sky.

Lastly, and possibly most important, forests make this earth comfortable and beautiful. Next to the soil, they are the most useful and helpful of Nature's agencies.