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

— Herman Melville

“At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.”

— Toni Morrison

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

— John Muir

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

— John Muir

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

— Iris Murdoch

“The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask.”

— Nancy Newhall

“At 70, you are but a child; at 80, you are merely a youth; and at 90 if the ancestors invite you into heaven, ask them to wait until you are 100 ... and then you might consider.”

— Old Okinawan expression

“The sea

isn’t a place

but a fact, and

a mystery ...”

— Mary Oliver

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

— Blaise Pascal

“Every spring is the only spring — a perpetual astonishment.”

— Ellis Peters

“On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.”

— Jules Renard

“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources ... But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.”

— Russian proverb

“In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing.”

— Seneca

“April ... hath put a spirit of youth in everything.”

— William Shakespeare

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

“We wanted a periodical that would help people live richer, fuller, freer, more self-directed lives.”

— John Shuttleworth

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.”

— Wallace Stegner

“I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden.”

— Ruth Stout

“Trees are the Earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“To harmonize with the surrounding scenery, to enter into the spirit of the landscape, in the highest beauty of domestic building.”

— J.J. Thomas 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Rain is grace.”

— John Updike

 

“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons: It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

— Walt Whitman

“Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

“In summer, the song sings itself.”

— William Carlos Williams

“Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright

“No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

— Zen proverb