[T]here is no practice… which tends to renovate the constitution, than a temporary retirement to the country… – John Sinclair, The Code of Health and Longevity, c.1815
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book. – Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945
When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself Yes indeed, all that belongs to me! – Henri Rousseau
I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. – Sydney Smith
People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and that it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow. – George William Russell
I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. – Leonardo da Vinci
Anybody can be good in the country. – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something. – Charles Dickens
There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets. – Samuel Johnson
When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. – William Hazlitt, Table Talk
As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children. – John Adams
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. – Vita Sackville-West, Country Notes
