Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.

The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.