“Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.”

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.

Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations.

We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold.

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.