The sorrows we imagine are more profound and inconsolable than real life leaves us time for.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

the urgent crowds out the essential.

The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do.

Perhaps the way with any obsession is to ignore it simply. Not to fight it, since it draws strength from any contact with us, whether hostile or friendly.

If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.

A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.