«I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed. Vegetation is the basic instrument the creator uses to set all of nature in motion.»

«Organic life beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.»

«The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.»

«Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.»

«Changes are not predictable; but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation»

«EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his _glutoeus maximus_.»

«When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.»

«Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources»

«If all the eighteen loads of vegetation became fruits, and the growing grass became sweet rice; if I were able to stop the sun and the moon in their orbits and hold them perfectly steady - even then, I would worship and adore You, and my longing to chant Your Praises would not decrease.»