“If any thing I can scribble be entertaining to you, may I be damned to transcribe dull books for the press all my life if I do not write abundantly.”

A playful early vow of literary productivity for the sake of friendship · Letter to Dr William Cranstoun, 11 December 1720

• Friendship
• Humour
• Writing

“There is, and I am persuaded of it, I triumph in it, another life after this, which depends as to its happiness on our virtue, as this for the most part on our fortune.”

Expressing firm belief in a future life whose joy rests on moral character · Letter to Dr William Cranstoun, 1725

• Eternity
• Faith
• Virtue

“Hope is the breath in the nostrils of happiness, when that goes this dies.”

Linking hope directly to the vitality of human happiness · Letter to Dr William Cranstoun

• Happiness
• Hope
• Life

“Retirement and nature are more and more my passion every day.”

Affirming the deepening pull of quiet rural life and the natural world · Letter to a friend, later years

• Nature
• Passion
• Solitude

“Nature delights me in every form.”

Expressing an unreserved love of the natural world in all its aspects · Letter to Dr William Cranstoun, September 1725

• Delight
• Feeling
• Nature

“What more inspiring than a calm, wide survey of them? In every dress nature is greatly charming! whether she puts on the crimson robes of the morning, the strong effulgence of noon, the sober suit of the evening, or the deep sables of blackness and tempest!”

Celebrating nature's beauty in every season and mood · Preface to Winter (second edition, 1726)

• Beauty
• Nature
• Wonder

“I know no subject more elevating, more amusing, more ready to awake the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of Nature. Where can we meet with such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”

Declaring nature the grandest theme for poetry, philosophy and moral feeling · Preface to Winter (second edition, 1726)

• Inspiration
• Nature
• Poetry