All quotes

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer.

The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.

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.

Every feature became more rigidly alpine, without, however, producing any chilling effect; for going to the mountains is like going home.

Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

Observe continually that all things exist in change; and keep this thought ever with you, that Nature loves nothing more than changing what things now are, and making others like them.

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.

None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm.

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.

A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk.

Just to touch the lichened bark of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat the same prayer in me.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.

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.

It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances.