After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.
Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.
We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.
If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.
The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.