A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.

Give the children an opportunity to make garden. Let them grow what they will. It matters less that they grow good plants than that they try for themselves.

The happiest life has the greatest number of points of contact with the world, and it has the deepest feeling and sympathy with everything that is.

There is great satisfaction in a well-made clean tool that does its work well.

There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.

No beast has ever overcome the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.

My life has been a continuous fulfillment of dreams. It appears that everything I saw and did has a new, and perhaps, more significant meaning, every time I see it. The earth is good. It is a privilege to live thereon.