It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous. 
Politics makes strange bedfellows. 
I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is. 
A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it. 
Goodness comes out of people who bask in the sun, as it does out of a sweet apple roasted before the fire. 
There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it. 
Nature is, in fact, a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven. 
Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and recreates. 
Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue. 
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently. 
Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless. 
The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in itsvalue.
Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. 
Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it. 
A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas. 
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. 
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. 
Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable. 
I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden ... name things as I find them. 
Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things. 
One of the best things in the world to be is a boy; it requires no experience, but needs some practice to be a good one. 
The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating of all. 
The stranger who receives the rare gift of human kindness holds its value in his heart forever. 
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world. 
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it. 
There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help. 
A boy has a natural genius for combining business with pleasure. 
There is no such thing as absolute value in this world. You can only estimate what a thing is worth to you. 