To cultivate a garden is. . . to go hand in hand with Nature in some of her most beautiful processes.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

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

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.