How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.

Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.

There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest.

Noble discontent is the path to heaven.

Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.