6 quotes
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
The Mountains of California (1894)
Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone.
The Mountains of California (1894)
Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries, the offspring of the sun and sea.
The Mountains of California (1894)
[Concerning the Sugar Pine:] The wood is deliciously fragrant, and fine in grain and texture; it is of a rich cream-yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.
The Mountains of California (1894)
It is generally supposed that complete pleasure of this kind, permeating one's very flesh and bones, unfits the student for scientific pursuits in which cool judgment and observation are required. But the effect is just the opposite. Instead of producing a dissipated condition, the mind is fertilized and stimulated and developed like sun-fed plants.
The Mountains of California (1894)
We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.
The Mountains of California (1894)