Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.

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

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it--a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.

That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.

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.