John Charles Van Dyke Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

You may see on the face of the globe numerous muddy Missouris, blue Rhones, and yellow Tibers; but there is only one red river and that is the Colorado.

John Charles Van Dyke
If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas, which, taken., are called education, we should know that there is nothing ugly under the sun, save that which comes from human distortion.

John Charles Van Dyke
How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness!

John Charles Van Dyke
Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent goddess just as our own inadequate vision happens to see her. If we have eyes only for her creative beauties we think her all goodness; if we see only her power of destruction we incline to think she is all evil.

John Charles Van Dyke
Even the clearest atmosphere has some coloring about it. Usually it is an indefinable blue. Air-blue means the most delicate of all colors - something not of surface depth but of transparency, builded up by superimposed strata of air many miles perhaps in thickness.

John Charles Van Dyke
There is no appeal from the law of nature. It was made for beast and bird and creeping things. Will the human never learn that in the eye of the law he is not different from the things that creep?

John Charles Van Dyke
The life of the desert lives only by virtue of adapting itself to the conditions of the desert. Nature does not bend the elements to favor the plants and the animals; she makes the plants and the animals do the bending.

John Charles Van Dyke
When he [the coyote] starts to move, it is with some deliberation. He prefers a dog-trot and often several shots from your rifle will not stir him into a run. He slips along easily and gracefully - a lean, hungrylooking wretch with all the insolence of a hoodlum and all the shrewdness of a thief.

John Charles Van Dyke