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

The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.

The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.

In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.

The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance.

The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army: the ranks are being continually depleted and continually recruited.

Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body.

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.