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The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.

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.

The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press

It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them.

The existence of such a government as ours for any length of time is a full proof of a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people.

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.

Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

In this way only we can ascertain the bent of our own tastes, for it is a general, though not of course an invariable, rule, that we profit little by books which we do not enjoy.

Many readers miss much of the pleasure of reading by forcing themselves to dwell too long continuously on one subject.

Of all the privileges we enjoy in this nineteenth century there is none, perhaps, for which we ought to be more thankful than for the easier access to books.

So delightful indeed are books that we must be careful not to forget other duties for them; in cultivating the mind we must not neglect the body.

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness.

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

It has been the happy combination of art and science which has trained us to perceive the beauty which surrounds us.

Education ought not to cease when we leave school; but if well begun there, will continue through life.

Moreover, whatever our occupation or profession in life may be, it is most desirable to create for ourselves some other special interest.

Whatever may be the subject of our choice, we shall find enough, and more than enough, to repay the devotion of a lifetime.