Rest, nature, books, music...such is my idea of happiness.

With pleasure I write my name in your Album. Ere long some younger man will be more happy to confer his name upon you. Don't allow it, Mary, until fully assured that he is worthy of the happiness.

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall.

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Nature is man's inorganic body - that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature - i.e., nature is his body - and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.