“Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.”

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.

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

Secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.

Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.