Nature and Elements

My little old dog: A heart-beat at my feet.

The dog is a Yes-animal, very popular with people who can’t afford to keep a Yes-man.

Pigs at a pastry cart.

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their plowing of the soil.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you. If a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshiped as gods.

We own a dog—he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat—he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there.

Some little token of esteem Is needed, like a dish of cream.

The cat purrs itself to sleep, being the only creature that sings its own lullaby.

I love in the cat that independent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents him from attaching himself to anyone

Youth is like spring, an overpraised season— delightful if it happen to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

Nature delights in punishing stupid people.

Can flowers but droop in absence of the sun, Which waked their sweets?

Can flowers but droop in absence of the sun, Which waked their sweets?

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.

Nature distributes her favors unequally.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.