Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life

The first copy of this little book was, of course, to have been for Gabrielle Delzant. I am fulfilling her wish, I think, in giving it, instead, to you, who were her oldest frie...

'Tis conceited, perhaps, to imagine myself an item in the musings of my silent companion, though I would fain be a pleasant one. But this much is certain, that, among general pr...

'Tis, methinks, a sign of the recent importation and comparative scarcity of honest livelihoods, that we should think so much how we come by our money, and so little how we part...

I felt the special gladness of being in Germany (for every country has its own way of making us happy), and glad that there should be in me something which answered to Germany's...

The greatest pleasures of reading consist in re-reading. Sometimes almost in not reading at all, but just thinking or feeling what there is inside the book, or what has come out...

The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due in some measure to our being less f...

Indeed, such faith in the heart's renewed fruitfulness is itself among the autumn blossomings, the hidden compensations. Young folk, and those who never outgrow youth's headlong...

Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise whenever a real individual creat...

Married people, as a rule, wish not to be pleased, or at least not to show it. They may be heartbroken at each other's death, and unable to endure a temporary separation; but th...

There is another source of good hidden in disappointment. For it is disappointment rather than age (age getting the credit for what it merely witnesses) which teaches us to work...