How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax. I am like a bee searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

In order to die, you must first have lived.

The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize or are fertilized. It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination...without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world, they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?