It is always interesting to see people in dead earnest, from whatever cause, and earthquakes make everybody earnest.

I have a low opinion of books; they are but piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention. No amount of word-making will ever make a single soul to know these mountains. As well seek to warm the naked and frostbitten by lectures on caloric and pictures of flame. One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.

No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty.