We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.

Love is ...not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.