The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summer time. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.

As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. … Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. … They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.

Life is a phenomenon sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury—you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.

Beauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.

All the great naturalists have been habitual walkers, for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur's or professional's.

Time is not money; time is an opportunity to live before you die. So a man who walks, and lives and sees and thinks as he walks, has lengthened his life.