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

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.

Most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

I have suffered no great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch. I have not wanted the earth.

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

The feminine character, the feminine perceptions, intuitions, delicacy, sympathy, quickness, are more responsive to natural forms and influences than is the masculine mind.

There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.

The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That’s Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type.

The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.

The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.

After I am dead, I would rather have men ask why Cato has no monument than why he had one.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

For life be, after all, only a waitin’ for somethin’ else than what we’re doin’; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.

Do you know how many athletes go broke three years after they stop playing? I want to help them hold on to their money. I mean, I know about budgets.

Doctors say it’s okay to have sex after a heart attack, provided you close the ambulance door.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

Life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but not above all for others those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.

I was really scared to stay home alone when I was kid, and I would freak out whenever there was a noise after my parents left.