“When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and wo...”

“Of all the people I have ever known you are the only one I don't know.”

“In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.”

“My feathered friends were so much to me that I am constantly tempted to make this sketch of my first years a book about birds and little else.”

“I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.”

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts ha...”

“Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous s...”

“I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?”

“A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”

“We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed...”

“Passion is a Horse Given to Us to Discipline.”