though pleasure may be purchasable, happiness cannot be bought for a price.

... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.

I'm not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.

Dignity is an anachronism.

The suitable is the last thing we ever want.