Great Throughts Treasury

"All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape."

"For all his learning or sophistication, man is still instinctively reaching toward that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is."

"Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls forth faith rather than reason."

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. "

"Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us."

"There are no limits to either time or distance, except as man himself may make them. I have but to touch the wind to know these things."

"The ultimate wisdom which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed. There it lies, the simplest fact of the universe and at the same time the one which calls faith rather than reason."

"A snowdrift is a beautiful thing-if it doesn't lie across the path you have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination."

"A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart."

"Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it."

"April is a promise that May is bound to keep."

"Consider the wheelbarrow. It may lack the grace of an airplane, the speed of an automobile, the initial capacity of a freight car, but its humble wheel marked out the path of what civilization we still have."

"Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law."

"Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it - and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement."

"He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history."

"Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet, and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest."

"Here comes February, a little girl with her first valentine, a red bow in her wind-blown hair, a kiss waiting on her lips, a tantrum just back of her laughter."

"I came to know that a frontier is never a place; it is a time and a way of life. I came to know that frontiers pass, but they endure in their people."

"I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together."

"I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution."

"If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees."

"In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives."

"March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice."

"No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn. April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it."

"No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn."

"October is the fallen leaf, but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen. It is the distant hills once more in sight, and the enduring constellations above them once again."

"Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night."

"Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January."

"There are no idealists in the plant world and no compassion. The rose and the morning glory know no mercy. Bindweed, the morning glory, will quickly choke its competitors to death, and the fencerow rose will just as quietly crowd out any other plant that tried to share its roothold. Idealism and mercy are human terms and human concepts."

"To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home."

"To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity."

"Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese."

"Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you would spend more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?"

"You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet."

"You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity."