Nature comes home to one most when one is at home. The stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.

It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.

When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast.

Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind like a resolution.

Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world.

[T]he cold warms me—after a different fashion from that of the kitchen stove.