“A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight.”

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness.

Perhaps it’s a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. … The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

Let your eye be chaste, your hand faithful, your tongue truthful and your heart enlightened.

Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.

it’ll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words -the color of a completely closed-in night

When you start using senses you’ve neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes.

In Nature nothing; is mean or contemptible, and it is only pride, originating in a false idea of our superiority, which causes our contempt for some of her productions. In the eyes of Nature, however, the oyster that vegetates at the bottom of the sea is as dear and perfect as the proud biped who devours it.

The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.

People seen by the mind are exactly different to things seen by the eye. They grow smaller and smaller as you come nearer down to them, whereas things become bigger.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.