Successful love takes a load off our hearts, and puts it upon our shoulders.

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

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.

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

All men are alike in their lower natures; it is in their higher characters that they differ.

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

He half retrieves a defeat who yields to it gracefully.