All quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Concentration is an aid to the doing of something; it is not the doing of something in itself.

Man is a thought-being, and his life and character are determined by the thoughts in which he habitually dwells.

Nothing comes unbidden; where the shadow is, there also is the substance.

Genius is free to announce its inventions and discoveries, and the hand is free to accomplish whatever the head conceives not incompatible with the rights of a fellow-being.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.

Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people?

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

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

The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.

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.