The quote database

Life is a mirror, and we find only ourselves reflected in our associates.

Every thought, every word is impressed upon it and carried out in amazing detail.

Man should make an art of thinking.

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.

With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

What to the intellect is old and worn-out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity is insatiable, but love is never tired.

Nature has taken more care than the fondest parent for the education and refinement of her children.

Entomology extends the limits of being in a new direction, so that I walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom.

Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Every artist does something more than copy Nature; more comes out in his account than goes into the original experience.

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.

Education is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process.

To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience.

There is the standing danger that the material of formal instruction will be merely the subject matter of the schools, isolated from the subject matter of life-experience.

In final account, then, not only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates.

After listening to it in all kinds of winds, night and day, season after season, I think I could approximate to my position on the mountains by this pine-music alone.

The whole world seems richer now that I have found this plant in so noble a landscape.

The most respectful deference is due to doubts originating in pure patriotism and sustained by venerated authority.

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.