To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another.
We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots.
Going from – toward; it is the history of every one of us.
Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye.
The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree’s, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent.
What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!
Every oak tree started out as a couple of nuts who stood their ground.
One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
The question is not what you look at – but how you look, and whether you see.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.
Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
We must look a long time before we can see.
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.
Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?
If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.
There is not so good an understanding between any two, but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness.
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction – a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.