The actual flower is the plant's highest fulfilment, and are not here exclusively for herbaria, county floras and plant geography: they are here first of all for delight.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.