Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying or inquisitive, not bent on seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.