“It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.”

How many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!

To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

We now use the word ‘nature’ very much as our fathers used the word ‘God.’

Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness.

Some men are like nails, very easily drawn; others however are more like rivets never drawn at all.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

The spirit of man can endure only so much and when it is broken only a miracle can mend it.

To be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

There is a great deal of speculation in the eye of an animal, but very little science.

All the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity.

No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it’s even better.

No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works – winning best actor is arbitrary.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

I started thinking about gender and how it’s an arbitrary thing if you’re born with an XX or XY chromosome, but it can determine your experience of the world. It’s about whether you are physically intimidating vs. being physically intimidated. It determines whether you are the one to take an active role in sex and society.

Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.