“Exhilarated with the mountain air, I feel like shouting this morning with excess of wild animal joy.”

— My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911 (I encountered this quote on pg. 30 of Champions of the Wilderness by Bruce and Carol Malnor [2009])

"There are no accidents in Nature. Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world is timed to the occasion for some definite, fore-ordered end. The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that marks the course of constellations, and the song of a bird is the echo of a universal symphony. Nature is one, and to me the greatest delight of observation and study is to discover new unities in this all-embracing and eternal harmony.”

— Three Days with John Muir: Conversations with the Man Who Has a Most Intimate Knowledge of Nature, written by French Strother, published in The World’s Work Magazine (1909)

“These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be.”

- My First Summer in the Sierra, Chapter 5: The Yosemite (1911)

"Little men, with only a book knowledge of science, have seized upon evolution as an escape from the idea of a God. 'Evolution!' a wonderful, mouth-filling word, isn't it? It covers a world of ignorance. Just say 'evolution' and you have explained every phenomenon of Nature and explained away God. It sounds big and wise. Evolution, they say, brought the earth through its glacial periods, caused the snow blanket to recede, and the flower carpet to follow it, raised the forests of the world, developed animal life from the jelly-fish to the thinking man … But what caused evolution? There they stick. To my mind, it is inconceivable that a plan that has worked out, through unthinkable millions of years, without one hitch or one mistake, the development of beauty that has made every microscopic particle of matter perform its function in harmony with every other in the universe, that such a plan is the blind product of an unthinking abstraction. No; somewhere, before evolution was, was an Intelligence that laid out the plan, and evolution is the process, not the origin, of the harmony. You may call that Intelligence what you please: I cannot see why so many people object to call it God.”

— Three Days with John Muir: Conversations with the Man Who Has a Most Intimate Knowledge of Nature, written by French Strother, published in The World’s Work Magazine (1909)

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

— My First Summer in the Sierra, Chapter 6: Mount Hoffman and Lake Tenaya (1911)

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows … In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,—no disgrace, no calamity … which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God … I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear … 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.”

— Nature (1849)

“Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience. Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, of the rivers and the sea? When he goes into the woods the birds fly before him and he finds none; when he goes to the river-bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave him alone. His secret is patience; he sits down, and sits still; he is a statue; he is a log. These creatures have no value for their time, and he must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obstinate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird and beast, which all wish to return to their haunts, begin to return. He sits still; if they approach, he remains passive as the stone he sits upon. They lose their fear. They have curiosity too about him. By and by the curiosity masters the fear, and they come swimming, creeping and flying towards him; and as he is still immovable, they not only resume their haunts and their ordinary labors and manners, show themselves to him in their work-day trim, but also volunteer some degree of advances towards fellowship and good understanding with a biped who behaves so civilly and well.”

— from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). The Complete Works. 1904. Vol. I. Nature, Addresses and Lectures, V. Education See here. I used only the short bolded part of the quote for the episode, but the whole context is nice so I thought I would include it here.

“you must depend upon … patience, for patience joins time to eternity.”

— How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)

“I went to the central Kalahari [and] … met these men who were probably some of the best trackers in the world. To watch these men go into the incredible, subtle signs in nature, things that my eye couldn’t even see, and then follow them, sometimes for hours, and find hidden animals in the landscape was just extraordinary to witness. I mean, they just were inside of the natural world. And I could feel I was outside. And I had this deep longing to be inside that world.”

— My Octopus Teacher (the first few minutes)

“Not here and now but now and here.
If you don't know the difference
is a matter of life and death, get down
naked on bare knees in the snow
and study the ticking of your watch.”

— After Ikkyu and Other Poems (1996)

“In short, all good things are wild and free.”

— Walking, pg. 49 of Project Gutenberg ebook version (1862)

“Always the nonconformist, Henry did things his own way. He walked at night when everyone else was sleeping. He took off his clothes and walked upstream through the river for the pure enjoyment of it. One morning, a local farmer saw him standing motionless on the edge of a little pond. At noon, Henry was still standing in the same spot. After dinner, Henry was still there. When the farmer asked what he was doing, Henry replied that he was studying bullfrogs. The farmer was flabbergasted!”

— Earth Heroes: Champions of the Wilderness, Bruce and Carol Malnor, pg. 16 (2009)

“We need the tonic of wildness,—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. 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 infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

— Walden; or, Life in the Woods, pg. 569 of Project Gutenberg ebook version (1854)

“Those of us who visit wild places the way others visit churches and concert halls visit because we return transfigured, recomposed, exalted and humbled at the same time, enlarged and dissolved in something larger at the same time. We visit because there we undergo some essential self-composition in the poetry of existence, though its essence rarely lends itself to words.”

— Thoreau on Nature and Human Nature, the Tonic of Wildness, and the Value of the Unexplored from The Marginalian (May 2021); see here

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.”

— Parts of Animals [De Partibus Animalium], Book 1, part 5 (circa 350 BC)

“If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.”

— Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living, p.123 (2005)

“When you look at those mountains, those immense rocks jetting into the sky, if you look at it quietly, you feel the immensity of it, the enormous majesty of it. And for the moment, for the second, that tremendous dignity of it, the solidity of it, puts away all your thoughts, your problems, for a second - right? And you say, 'How marvellous that is'. So what has taken place there? The majesty of those mountains for a second, the very immensity of the sky and the blue, and the snow-clad mountains, drives away all your problems. It makes you totally forget yourself for a second. You are enthralled by it, you are struck by it … You understand? The mountain, the river, the meadows and the groves absorb you, you forget yourself.”

— Beauty is the Quiet of the Self Forgotten, Public Talk 4 Saanen, Switzerland - 17 July 1985

“Have you ever experimented with looking at an objective thing like a tree without any of the associations, any of the knowledge you have acquired about it, without any prejudice, any judgment, any words forming a screen between you and the tree and preventing you from seeing it as it actually is? Try it and see what actually takes place when you observe the tree with all your being, with the totality of your energy. In that intensity you will find that there is no observer at all; there is only attention. It is when there is inattention that there is the observer and the observed. When you are looking at something with complete attention there is no space for a conception, a formula or a memory.”

— Freedom from the Known, ch. 11 (1969)

“Well, I think anyone who has an experience of mystery and awe knows that there is a dimension, let’s say, or the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads, “When, before a sunset or a mountain and the beauty of this or that, you pause and say, ‘Ah,’ that is participation in divinity.” And I think that’s what it is, it’s the realization of wonder. And also the experience of tremendous power, which people of course living in the world of nature are experiencing all the time. You know there’s something there that’s much bigger than the human dimension.”

— The Power of Myth (with Bill Moyers); Episode 6: The Masks of Eternity (1988)

“In antiquity there were two definitions of beauty … The one describes beauty as the proper conformity of the parts to one another, and to the whole. The other, stemming from Plotinus, describes it … as the translucence of the eternal splendor of the ‘one’ through the material phenomenon.”

— Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Greatest Physicists edited by Ken Wilber; chapter 5: Science and the Beautiful, pg. 57 (2001 edition of an originally 1984 publication)

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

— Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)

“Every … plant stands forth as a unique, creative sculpture and is a perfect expression of its essence. Divinity shines forth from all Creation to those who can see. Nature becomes not unlike a children’s cartoon where the trees smile, the animals talk, and the flowers move gaily. When perception ceases, the world of wonder reveals itself. Consciousness is in all that exists. It recognizes itself manifesting as the All of Creation.”

— The Eye of the I, ch. 15, pg. 228 (2001)

“I grew to love the animals. I felt a strong connection with them. It was impossible not to, living with them 24 hours a day. I was determined that I was going to understand them wholly, for what they were, and realised that the only way to do that was through observing them. I knew I wasn’t going to get the knowledge from reading books. So I set my mind to watching and observing every detail, every moment of the day, for days on end.

After about three months, as I became more concentrated on the horses, I noticed that I wasn’t thinking anymore. My mind had gone quiet. I realised that knowing and thinking are two different things, and that you could know without thinking. I wasn’t forming opinions or jumping to conclusions anymore. I began to do things spontaneously, to live in the moment. I had a strong feeling that I was finally going in the right direction, that this was my path, and I should keep going with this, carry on observing the animals so intently.

It wasn’t till much later that I realised that the exercise I’d given myself was mindfulness meditation. In effect, I was meditating about 20 hours a day, 7 days a week for three years, completely absorbed in caring for the horses. It was a life of continual service, with no thought for myself.

Then it happened. I woke up one morning and looked across at the horses, watching the steam rise out of their nostrils the way it does on a cold morning. The next thing I knew I wasn’t just observing the horse, from the outside. I was the horse. I was looking inside it. I was it. I could look through its eyes and its mind. I was aware of its true nature. I was aware that all things are one. There was a sense of profound peace within me.

It was a revelation. I looked at another horse, and another, and I was inside them as well … I saw everything in its true nature … We were all the same nature, all arising from the same source. My own nature was just as theirs was, in a different form, with one consciousness linking us all together. They were only separate in terms of form and structure. It was the same essence, the same emptiness, in all of them — in all of us. I went outside to look at the trees, and they were the same nature. Then I looked at my own body, and inside myself, and there was nobody there. My normal sense of self had disappeared.

At that moment there was no more anger, no more frustration, just a sense of peace. There was no desire, no aversion; everything was as it should be.”

— Not I, Not other than I: The Life and Teachings of Russel Williams, pgs. 76-77 (2015)

“Blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.”

— Matthew 13:16

“Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”

— A bunch of places throughout the Bible, including Mark 4:23, Matthew 11:15 & Luke 8:8. See here.

“Cut wood, I am there; lift stone, I am there.”

— Gospel of Thomas saying 77

“The pine forest, dark and mysterious, tempted five-year-old Richard. He could hardly wait to explore it. At first he followed the path, but soon he found himself in a dense part of the forest. Then the path disappeared into a thick tangle of ferns. The ferns were taller than he was. And he walked underneath them, the sunlight shining through the fronds cast a green glow over his head.

The undergrowth was so thick he could only see a few yards ahead. But he wasn’t afraid. He was exhilarated! The further he walked, the more joyful he became. The ferns gradually grew shorter and gave way to a clearing. Dry pine needles covered the forest floor like a soft, brown carpet.

It was here that young Richard had a mystical experience. He felt united with all of creation. There was no separation, only oneness. He was alone, but felt deeply connected to all of the living creatures he loved so dearly. He was lost, but felt only bliss. Overwhelmed with the beauty all around him, he sank to the ground.

In that moment his heart ‘brimmed over with a sense of unspeakable thankfulness’ that followed him through all his life.”

— Earth Heroes: Champions of the Wilderness, Bruce and Carol Malnor, pg. 71; (2009)

“In the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed and after that the flowers and fruit appear, [Brother Lawrence] received a high view of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul … This view had perfectly set him loose from the world, and kindled in him such a love for God, that he could not tell whether it had increased during the .. years he had lived since.”

— The Practice of the Presence of God: Being Conversations and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Brother Lawrence, first conversation (2016 edition of an 1895 translation of a text first published in 1692)

“Brahma satya jagat mithya.”
(God is Absolute Reality. The world is a relative illusion.)

— Brahma Jnanavali Mala Verse 20

“The world is an illusion. Only Brahman is real. The world is Brahman.”

— Talks with Raman Maharshi