happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

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

Enthusiasm is a plant which grows variously in the varying soils of different natures.

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.

Summer weather, like being in love,is a philosopher's stone which turns our ordinary days to gold. But not the whole day ... For it is never the whole day, never all our life which is transformed in any happiness, but only the exquisite moments.

the urgent crowds out the essential.

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