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

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.

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

Why, we have invented the whole machinery of the supernatural, with its unseen spirits and powers, good and bad, to account for things, because we found the universal everyday nature too cheap, too common, too vulgar.

I am for 100 per cent Americanism, 100 per cent efficiency, and 100 per cent life. I expect to live to be 100 years old.

The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.

A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.

The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.