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“But, whichever way I go, I am glad I came.”
The pleasure of walking is not confined to one perfect route because attention and openness allow value to emerge from whichever road is actually taken.
Source note: Winter Sunshine, essay “The Exhilarations of the Road.” The sentence follows Burroughs’s comparison of winter walks in different directions and precedes his claim that all roads lead toward the walker’s sought-for Jerusalem.
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“How interesting everything is!”
Wonder becomes a method of attention: rocks, streams, plants, and animals all become invitations to learn rather than background scenery.
Source note: My First Summer in the Sierra, near the close of the summer journal.
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“All the world seemed new-born.”
Intense attention can make familiar surroundings feel newly encountered, turning an ordinary moment into a renewed experience of landscape and life.
Source note: Travels in Alaska, mountain excursion near the Stickeen; Muir describes the effect of evening light after a strenuous day.
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“The poetry of earth is never dead.”
Seasonal change does not extinguish natural life; the poem hears a continuing voice in both summer and winter.
Source note: On the Grasshopper and Cricket, opening line.
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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.
Source note: Endymion, Book I, opening line; Project Gutenberg #24280. This is a poetic proposition within a Romantic work, not an empirical rule that every aesthetic experience remains pleasurable forever.
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“Autumn spoke loudly of the beautiful.”
Wilcox treats autumn itself as an emphatic expression of beauty, using seasonal color and change as evidence for attentive aesthetic appreciation.
Source note: Poems of Optimism, “Beauty”; Project Gutenberg #7421. The surrounding stanza describes autumn forests as a gallery of vivid colors; the line is poetic and devotional observation, not a scientific claim about aesthetic value.