There are books... which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.

Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Every industrious man, in every lawful calling, is a useful man. And one principal reason why men are so often useless is that they neglect their own profession or calling, and divide and shift their attention among a multiplicity of objects and pursuits.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.

All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.

The eye is easily frightened.