“A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks.”

A warmly domestic celebration of childhood, animals and household happiness · Prose, The Doctor

• Animals
• Childhood
• Home

“There is such a comfort in one’s old coat and old shoes, one’s own chair and own fireside, one’s own writing-desk and own library.”

Celebrating the familiar comforts of home, books and private work · Letter to Grosvenor C. Bedford, 11 January 1808

• Books
• Home
• Simplicity

“Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.”

Contrasting animal instinct with humanity’s capacity to misuse reason · Prose, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies, 1829

• Animals
• Humanity
• Instinct