Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses.

The most brilliant flashes of wit come from a clouded mind, as lightning leaps only from an obscure firmament.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.

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

There is no sense of weariness like that which closes in a day of eager and unintermittent pursuit of pleasure. The apple is eaten, but "the core sticks in the throat." Expectation has then given way to ennui, appetite to satiety.

Affliction, like the iron-smith, shapes as it smites.

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.