“The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.”

The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That’s Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.

When Darwin published his conclusion that man was descended from an apelike ancestor who was again descended from a still lower type.

The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

He is a reversion to an earlier type, the type of the bard, the skald, the poet-seer.

On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.

The animal world seizes its food in masses little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable, through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.

Secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer.

Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.

The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.

The greatest school of the theater. It houses great people like Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Arthur Kennedy, Mildred DunnockVery few get into it, and it is absolutely free.

I think people resist freedom because they’re afraid of the unknown. But it’s ironic.

Through endless time God’s greatest gift is continuously given in silence. But when mankind becomes completely deaf to the thunder of His Silence God incarnates as Man.

The getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey.

Just think you are the greatest. Where’s the harm in thinking like that? It is not for pride you do it, but for bringing the best out of you. There is nothing wrong.

Among the greatest of all great services is the education of children, and promotion of the various sciences, crafts and arts. Praised be God, ye are now exerting strenuous efforts toward this end.

She was crazy. I could be too. It was my greatest fear, that I’d snap one day too. Just like she had. I wanted to live life because if that day came I wanted to have lived once.

I don’t believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of “fairness” is what’s troubling to me.