the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

Life may take away happiness. But it can't take away having had it.

Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered.

He who demands little gets it.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

. . . 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.