Language is the most perfect work of art in the world. The chisel of a thousand years retouches it. - Henry David Thoreau

There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest.

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.