“May books and nature be their early joy!”

O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!

There is creation in the eye.

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.

Rest and be thankful.

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind.

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

Love betters what is best.

One daffodil is worth a thousand pleasures, then one is too few.

The ocean is a mighty harmonist.

The softest breeze to fairest flowers gives birth: Think not that Prudence dwells in dark abodes, She scans the future with the eye of gods.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar.

How many undervalue the power of simplicity ! But it is the real key to the heart.

Delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood.

And we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Books, the children of the brain.

The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it graduallly comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed.

Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.

For out of old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all this new science that men learn.