James A. Michener Quotes

The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.

Tahoe is a magical place full of positive energy, beautiful mountains, and lakes all around. It's home for me and feels so good to be there.

This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

Lake George is without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw; formed by a contour of mountains into a basin... finely interspersed with islands, its water limpid as crystal, and the mountain sides covered with rich groves... down to the water-edge: here and there precipices of rock to checker the scene and save it from monotony.

The Congo is really beautiful. People correct me and say, "Oh, you mean the Democratic Republic of the Congo." Well, fine. But, the land there, the landscape is extraordinary. It's big lakes and beautiful hills and trees.

I wind about, and in and out, - With here a blossom sailing, - And here and there a lusty trout, - And here and there a grayling.

Living there [Horse Mesa] was like living in a natural cathedral. Waking up every morning, you walked outside and looked down at the blue lake, then up at the sandstone cliffs--those awe-inspiring layers of red and yellow rock shaped over the millennia, with dozens of black-streaked crevices that temporarily became waterfalls after rainstorms.

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. At no other time have I so sharp an understanding of what God means to do with me as in these hours of dawn.

The silence of the mountain is even more beautiful once the birds are quiet.

White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value;they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.

As I stood and watched the mists slowly rising this morning I wondered what view was more beautiful than this.

There is nothing more beautiful than nature early in the morning.

It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning.

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Naturemen appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

As any man, I, of course, have certain preferences. Being a Scot by birth, I'm inclined to favor those with a well-scrubbed look and a hint of color in their cheeks-put there by an early walk in the chill air rather than by rouge. The smell of soap on a woman's skin or the hint of shampoo in her hair is perfume enough for me . . . Humor is important. The most beautiful woman in the world is a bore without that.

With social media and advertising and filters and FaceTune-ing it's hard to even to know what's real and what's not. So to see an image of a woman where you can actually see her face and her skin texture and she's still polished and beautiful or even glamorous with a nighttime look, but it still feels like a real person. I feel like that's the kind of beauty I want to applaud and align myself with.

Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

I love this place; I love mountains and big skies and forests. And the weather is still supremely beautiful even though the lower peaks are powdered with fresh snow. But Heavens! What sun. It never has an ending. I am basking at this minute - half past four - too hot without a hat, & the sky is that transparent blue only to be seen in autumn - the forest trees steeped in light.

When we accept our own wild beauty, it is put into perspective, and we are no longer poignantly aware of it anymore, but neither would we forsake it or disclaim it either. Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.

I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of Nature, always kept it beautiful.

There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice. There can be no real peace and security until there be first justice enjoyed by all the inhabitants of that beautiful land. The Bible knows nothing about peace without justice, for that would be crying "peace, peace, where there is no peace". God's Shalom, peace, involves inevitably righteousness, justice, wholeness, fullness of life, participation in decision-making, goodness, laughter, joy, compassion, sharing and reconciliation.

I love being natural. I never feel more beautiful then after I’ve been to the beach and my hair’s just a crazy mess of salt curls, or when I’ve just been outside all day hiking. I feel like my skin is at its most beautiful during those times, too - so I try not to do a lot.