A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.

There is no kind obondage which life lays upon us that may not yield both sweetness and strength; and nothing reveals a man's character more fully than the spirit in which he bears his limitations.

The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.

Genius can do much, but even genius falls short of the actuality of a single human life.

It is better to go down on the great seas which human hearts were made to sail than to rot at the wharves in ignoble anchorage.

Genius is intensity of life; an overflowing vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a hemisphere of being; which makes a nature many-sided and whole, while most men remain partial and fragmentary.

Man is incomprehensible without Nature and Nature is incomprehensible apart from man. For the delicate loveliness of the flower is as much in the human eye as in its own fragile petals and in the splendor of the heavens as much in the imagination that kindles at the touch of their glory as in the shining of countless worlds.