Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever remains to them?

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer. My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music. It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world.

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.

It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.