All quotes

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

My world is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life.

Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touch is my reality.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel.

What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!

My most sacred and memorable life is commonly on awaking in the morning.

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 animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.

This is a glorious region, and the air and life are intoxicating.

We may hasten or we may retard, but we can not prevent, the final reconciliation.

Under our system there is a remedy for all mere political evils in the sound sense and sober judgment of the people.

The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obliged to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did uncomplainingly if not cheerfully.

If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.

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.

Nature loves such woods, and places her own seal upon them.

The emotions excited by the songs of these thrushes belong to a higher order, springing as they do from our deepest sense of the beauty and harmony of the world.

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.

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.