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

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.

Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often.

Nature furnishes the conditions – the solitude – and the soul furnishes the entertainment.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.

The dog is often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.

I find that something one gets from Emerson in early life does not leave him when he grows old.

Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing.

How many thorns of human nature are bristling conceits, buds of promise grown sharp for want of congenial climate.

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

Leap, and the net will appear.

The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady’s-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.

Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.

Your smile is a delicacy.