Nothing is so beautiful as spring – when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush Thrushs eggs look little low heavens, and thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing. – Gerard Manley Hopkins

Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, and October woods! – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims, “Inspiration”

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live. – Marcus Tullius Cicero