Quotes from William Cullen Bryant

There is no glory in star or blossom till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes till breathed with joy as they wander by.

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms she speaks A various language.

God hath yoked to guilt her pale tormentor,--misery.

A sculptor wields The chisel, and the stricken marble grows To beauty.

It is natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes an interesting side branch.

A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a family from Korea. We weren't sure whether they were from North Korea or South Korea.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident that she was a rarity.

Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.

I assume he was descended from apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope.

My father liked Iowa. He lived his whole life in the state, and is even now working his way through eternity there, in Glendale Cemetery in Des Moines.

When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.

The little wind-flower, whose just opened eye Is blue as the spring heaven it gazes at.

I can tell you that tonight in Des Moines, Iowa, my home town, people all across the city will be putting a hand to their ears and saying "What is that sound?", and it will be the sound of Mr De Vito, my High School Careers Officer, spinning in his grave.

Despite declining catches, New England fishermen continue to receive state and federal tax incentives that encourage them in some cases all but compel them to acquire bigger boats and to harvest the seas more intensively. Today the fishermen of Massachusetts are reduced to fishing the hideous hagfish, for which there is a slight market in the Far East, but even their numbers are now falling.

By almost universal agreement, the most vague and ineffectual of all [Presidents] was Millard Fillmore, who succeeded to the office in 1850 upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and spent the next three years demonstrating how the country would have been run if they had just propped Taylor up in a chair with cushions.

If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.

Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson, Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green. Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.

Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine - 'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.

The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by, As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky.

No man of woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.

I have always wanted to know why, wherever archaeologists dig, do they always find red and white poles?

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implementsmore like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldnt go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of ones sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail.