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" My motto is never to try to imitate anybody: I have always looked inward and followed the inward voice. "

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" 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. "

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

" Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him. "

" The distribution of plants in a given locality is not more marked and defined than that of the birds. Show a botanist a landscape, and he will tell you where to look for the lady's-slipper, the columbine, or the harebell. On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink. "

" Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention. "

" 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. "

" Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man. "

" All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock. "

" 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. "

" To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity; it is rather conferring divinity upon the body. "

" 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. The geologist is pretty sure to be an evolutionist. "

" To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others, it means what it means to many fortunate human beings - travels in warm climes. 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 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. "

" Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality. "

" Emerson was such an important figure in our literary history, and in the moral and religious development of our people, that attention cannot be directed to him too often. "

" If you think you can do it, you can. "

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

" Like tens of thousands of others, I have been a spectator of, rather than a participator in, the activities - political, commercial, sociological, scientific - of the times in which I have lived. "

" 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. "

" I have thought that a good test of civilization, perhaps one of the best, is country life. Where country life is safe and enjoyable, where many of the conveniences and appliances of the town are joined to the large freedom and large benefits of the country, a high state of civilization prevails. "

" 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. "

" 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 beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives, and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song! "

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

" The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark, secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer. "

" We are beginning to see that money, after all, is not the main thing. The real values cannot be bought and sold. "

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