One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapour is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God, and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society.”

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times

Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

I ran home in the moonlight with long, firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong

“I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising

The snow is melting into music

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen

Fortunately wrong cannot last. Soon or late it must fall back home to Hades, while some compensating good must surely follow.”

The power of imagination makes us infinite

There is nothing more eloquent in Nature than a mountain stream

One must labor for beauty as for bread.

Wherever there were glaciers, the world was in a constant state of creation.