“I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.”

There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

All the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity.

We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.

Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities – political, commercial, sociological, scientific – of the times in which I have lived.

Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

The naturist must see all things in the light of his experiences in this world.

Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

The love of nature is a different thing from the love of science, though the two may go together.

Father knew me not. All my aspirations in life were a sealed book to him, as much as his peculiar religious experiences were to me.

My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice.

Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.

Some disagreeable circumstances that attend my situation.

Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.

It’s not enough to attend church and pray every Sunday; you have to act.

Perils as well as privileges attend the higher Christian life. The nearer we come to God, the thicker the hosts of darkness in heavenly places. Aggressive Christianity is the world’s greatest need.

My first introduction to South Africa’s struggle for freedom came when I was just 17. I had volunteered to speak in my mother’s stead at a United Nations forum on South Africa because she was unable to attend on that occasion.

If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it that you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.

I couldn’t have attended half the parties that I was supposed to have been to according to the newspapers. It bothers me.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.