There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from the equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and manage a smile.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

Summer is when we believe, all of a sudden, that if we just walked out the back door and kept on going long enough and far enough we would reach the Rocky Mountains.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

If human nature eventually is going to take the place of nature everywhere, those of us who have been naturalists will have to transpose the faith in nature which is inherent in the profession to a faith in man-if necessary, man alone in the world.

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

Silence is exhilarating at first-as noise is-but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

"Sophistication" is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their minds eye the notion of a better life ahead.