Sunny Slope

Mountain Sunset

"When I admire the wonders of a sunset or the beauty of the moon, my soul expands in the worship of the creator."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Sandy Ridge

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is
 are the ones who have gone over."
- Hunter S. Thompson

Rocky Slope

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."
- Aldo Leopold

Mountainside Rock Formations

"Nature does nothing uselessly."
- Aristotle

Rock Wall

"Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We've Come Far

"The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of mountains and summer these elemental presences lived and had their being..."
- Henry Beston

Star Lake

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."
- Wallace Stevens

Lake Tahoe Views

"The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world."
- Georges Simenon

"The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach."
- Henry Beston

Boulders

"Philosophy [nature] is written in the great book which ever is before our eyes – I mean the universe – but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are boulders, trees and other natural figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth."
- Galileo Galilei

Landslide

"Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work."
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Margaret Mountain Thorn Bushes

"To Solitude

O solitude! If I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,

Nature's observatory–whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee."

- John Keats

Freel Peak

"It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things."
- Leonardo da Vinci

Lake Margaret

"...and then, I have nature and art and poetryy, and if that is not enough, what is enough?"
- Vincent Van Gogh

More Mountains

"I believe in God, only I spell it Nature."
- Frank Lloyd Wright

"And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth's shore. These mountains, which have seen untold sunrises, long to thunder praise but stand reverent, silent so that man's weak praise should be given God's attention."
- Donald Miller

"Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?"
- Walt Disney Company

"I am a lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees."
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Yellow Meadow

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
- Henry David Thoreau

Bright Pink Wild Flowers

"Wild flowers are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art."
- Louisa May Alcott

Mountain Trail

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lake Isolation Wilderness

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
- John Muir

Mountain Trees

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
- Henry David Thoreau

"I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want."
- Andy Warhol

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
- William Blake

"Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go."
- May Sarton

Green Meadow

"The poetry of the earth is never dead."
- John Keats

Mountain Stream

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
- Cormac McCarthy 

Forest Valley

"Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty."
- Albert Einstein

Heading Home

"Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us."
- Brian Jacques

Snowy Saddle

"I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says 'Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.'"
- Lewis Carroll

Sun Bowl

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles though the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving
across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world
offers itself to you imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–over and over announcing your place in the family of things."
- Mary Oliver