Donald G. Mitchell quotes:

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of an August day.

The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.

The future is wider than vision, and has no end.

There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry.

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart.

The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him - coming from above, and from around; but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.

But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

You grow up however, unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities.

I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight.

I thank Heaven every summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks.

I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.