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

The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

Emerson is the spokesman and prophet of youth and of a formative, idealistic age. His is a voice from the heights which are ever bathed in the sunshine of the spirit.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.

The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.

In October, a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days, its presence helps to dispel the gloom.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.

A sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. It is the fruit of the equal marriage of the sun and frost.

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

Even in rugged Scotland, nature is scarcely wilder than a mountain sheep, certainly a good way short of the ferity of the moose and caribou.

The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance.

The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of an army: the ranks are being continually depleted and continually recruited.

Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.

Most people were shocked by the thought; it was intensely repugnant to their feelings.

Perils as well as privileges attend the higher Christian life. The nearer we come to God, the thicker the hosts of darkness in heavenly places. Aggressive Christianity is the world’s greatest need.

My first introduction to South Africa’s struggle for freedom came when I was just 17. I had volunteered to speak in my mother’s stead at a United Nations forum on South Africa because she was unable to attend on that occasion.

If you have so much business to attend to that you have no time to pray, depend upon it that you have more business on hand than God ever intended you should have.

I couldn’t have attended half the parties that I was supposed to have been to according to the newspapers. It bothers me.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.