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• Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated.
  It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty....
• When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop
  iped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with all other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty....
• When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
  -- My First Summer in the Sierra , 1911, page 110....
• Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying
  keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another....
• Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves?
  Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance....
• Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants, and law-givers are ever at their wit's end devising.
  The hall and the theater and the church have been invented, and compulsory education....
• How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind!
  The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air....
• Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly.
  Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end....
• So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert.
  And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees....