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

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.

I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life.

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.

What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it – would you be likely to give them another?

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

To speak another language is to have another soul

I’m so tough and so bad, I can be humble and lift another guy up.