“Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.”

More than any other poet, Whitman is what we make him; more than any other poet, his greatest value is in what he suggests and implies rather than in what he portrays, and more than any other poet must he wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of himself.

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.

If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature. And the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature.

To strong, susceptible characters, the music of nature is not confined to sweet sounds.

To still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms, it means death.

The birth of a baby and the blooming of a flower are natural events, but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us the key to the secret of either.

Nature teaches more than she preaches.

One of the most graceful of warriors is the robin. I know few prettier sights than two males challenging and curveting about each other upon the grass in early spring. Their attentions to each other are so courteous and restrained.

Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.

The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist.

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

If you think you can do it, you can.

When a herd of cattle see a strange object, they are not satisfied till each one has sniffed it; and the horse is cured of his fright at the robe, or the meal-bag, or other object, as soon as he can be induced to smell it.

Our flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground, he is more helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.

The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful.

Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have made no secret of their desire to stamp out individualism and enterprise.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us.

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’

I had the Buffalo shoes, a customised Baby Spice necklace – when I say custom-made, it was made out of plastic from the local mall – and a Union Jack dress.

The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

I am a hidden meaning made to defy. The grasp of words, and walk away With free will and destiny. As living, revolutionary clay.