Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.

If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.

The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it. They must not do too much of it. And they must have a sense of success in it.