We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds… A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds.

Circles, like the soul, are never-ending and turn round and round without a stop

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.

A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Life is short, but there is always time enough for courtesy.

Friendship is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution.

We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity.

When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. 

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

Health is the first muse, and sleep is the condition to produce it.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. […] It is content to seek health of body by complying with physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The earth laughs in flowers.

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship. 

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.

If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

The ancient precept, “Know thyself”, and the modern precept, “Study nature”, become at last one maxim.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing.

The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.

The world globes itself in a drop of dew.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. 

The power of Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circumstances. Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

Nature is methodical, and doeth her work well. Time is never to be hurried.

When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.

Love and you shall be loved. 

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

The least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation.