“If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them.”

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.

The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

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 am for 100 per cent Americanism, 100 per cent efficiency, and 100 per cent life. I expect to live to be 100 years old.

The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.

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

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.

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.