“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”

August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!

England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.

I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.

One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury.

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.

Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.

The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad.

I have discovered the secret of happiness. It is work.

Emerson’s fame as a writer and thinker was firmly established during his lifetime by the books he gave to the world.

Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.

Nature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.

The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.

I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.