To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes, to learn something of her choicest secrets, and to have a more intelligent interest awakened in the beautiful order of her works elsewhere.

Passion looks not beyond the moment of its existence. Better, it says, the kisses of love to day, than the felicities of heaven afar off.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!

To death we owe our life; the passing of one generation opens a way for another.

Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

The nearest approximation to an understanding of life is to feel it--to realize it to the full--to be a profound and inscrutable mystery.