Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.

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

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.