“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”

Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations.

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

August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements!

England is like the margin of a spring-run: near its source, always green, always cool, always moist, comparatively free from frost in winter and from drought in summer.

I have discovered the secret of happiness – it is work, either with the hands or the head.

One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury.

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.

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.

“What if I like watching television? What if I don’t want to do much else other than read a book?”.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things.

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.