People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.
I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
Money often costs too much.
It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'always do what you are afraid to do.'
When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.
One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.
All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.
Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole.
As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
As soon as there is life there is danger.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
A man in debt is so far a slave.
We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation.
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
Beauty is an outward gift, which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.
