It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

and

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

are among my favorites.

I also love the book The Outermost House by Henry Beston. The best quote from it is:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

And, finally, I could cite the whole damn chapter called “Four Gates to the City” in my favorite book of all time, Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. ButI’ll just post a link to a copy of it online instead, because I know you’ve read it, and I’ve already spammed your blog enough.