People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.

Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.

When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house-hold God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling.

There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

... no human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.

My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,- if I could have been invisible, all the better. . . to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, - happier if it needed no help of mine, - this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.