“I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.”

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.

We talk of communing with Nature, but ’tis with ourselves we commune.

Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities – political, commercial, sociological, scientific – of the times in which I have lived.

Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.