California Caverns

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
- Leo Tolstoy

"But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose."
- Anne Brontë

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."
- Confucius

Rock Formation

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."
- Anne Frank

Red Spine Flowers

"Sometimes things are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
- Markus Zusak

Red and Yellow Cactus Flowers

"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

Chipmunk

"I like this place and could willingly waste my time in it."
- William Shakespeare

Desert Rocks

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature–
the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
- Rachel Carson

Joshua Tree Cactus

"I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic."
- George Carlin

Split Rock Formation

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery–air, mountains, trees, people.
I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.'"
- Sylvia Plath

Joshua Trees, Cacti, Yucca, and Rocks

"The earth has music for those who listen."
- George Santayana

Joshua Trees and Rocks

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his conciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein

Stormy Clouds

"I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There are different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this."
- Henry David Thoreau

Blue Sky Peeking Through

"How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena
to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!"
- Henry David Thoreau

Late Afternoon Field

"I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it."
- Henry David Thoreau

"I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen."
- Henry David Thoreau

Daisy

"Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading. I read in Audubon with a thrill of delight, when the snow covers the ground, of the magnolia, and the Florida keys, and their warm sea breezes; of the fence-rail, and the cotton-tree, and the migrations of the rice-bird; of the breaking up of winter in Labrador, and the melting of the snow on the forks of the Missouri; and owe an accession of health to these reminiscences of luxuriant nature."
- Henry David Thoreau

Clothes Line

"Try to be like the turtle - at ease in your own shell."
- Bill Copeland

Old Window Boxes

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen
 or even touched - they must be felt with the heart."
- Helen Keller

Old Mail Box

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

Evening Field

"Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything."
- Henry David Thoreau

Shadowed Road

"Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life."
- Henry David Thoreau

Puffy Clouds

"I have a room all to myself; it is nature."
- Henry David Thoreau

Windy Field

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society."
- Henry David Thoreau

Clouds

"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Foggy Morning

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
- William Shakespeare

Yellow and Purple Ombre Flowers

"Earth laughs in flowers."
- Ralpph Waldo Emerson

Spring Blossoms

"Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher."
- William Wordsworth

Colorful Field

"The good man is the friend of all living things."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Sunny Field

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."
- John Ruskin

Happy Dog

"There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue,
and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear.
It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods
that they avoid the pathway of sound."
- Thomas Hardy

Grass

"What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure;
but scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable."
- Joseph Addison

Early Morning Sun

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path,
we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."
- Henry David Thoreau

The House

"The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak,
became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong."
- Thomas Carlyle

Lupins

"There are always flowers for those who want to see them."
- Henri Matisse

Purple Iris

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow."
- Helen Keller