The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrate to some stroke of the imagination.

The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.

Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.