“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.”

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls.

The secret of happiness is something to do.

The moment I have something to do, the draughts are open and my chimney draws, and I am happy.

Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.

It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense – the home sense – which operates unerringly.

The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism.

As life nears its end with me, I find myself meditating more and more upon the mystery of its nature and origin, yet without the least hope that I can find out the ways of the Eternal in this or in any other world.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.

We are really here to be happy and to make others happy.

The Nature Lover is not looking for mere facts but for meanings, for something he can translate into terms of his own life.

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter.

The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of, they starve her to death, and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty, nothing but a rival queen.

If one gains an interest in the history of the earth, he is quite sure to gain an interest in the history of the life on the earth. If the former illustrates the theory of development, so must the latter.

Women are about the best lovers of nature, after all; at least of nature in her milder and more familiar forms.