Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. At home, too, they are in their mothers care. She can keep them from learning immoral things from other children.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
We are the heirs of the ages; but the estate is entailed, as large estates frequently are, so that while we inherit the earth, the great round world which is God's footstool, we have only the use of it while we live and must pass it on to those come after us. We hold the property in trust and have no right to injure it or to lessen its value. To do so is dishonest, stealing from our heirs their inheritance.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it. Wings of geese, of brant, of ducks and pelicans and cranes and heron and swans and gulls; bearing them all away to green fields in the South.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
That which is the wonder of one age is the commonplace of the next.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Now plums were ripening in the wild-plum thickets all along Plum Creek. Plum trees were low trees. They grow close together, with many little scraggly branches all strung with thin-skinned, juicy plums. Around them the air was sweet and sleepy, and wings hummed.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that things truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes, and Mary was blind.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
She heard pa shouting,"Jiminy crickets! It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!

Laura Ingalls Wilder
The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. All the wild seeds of weed and thistle, the sprouts of vine and bush and tree, are trying to take the fields. Farmers must fight them with harrow and plow and hoe; they must plant the good seeds quickly.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
There is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Let's be cheerful! We have no more right to steal the brightness out of the day for our own family than we have to steal the purse of a stranger.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
He counted all the bills over twice, and he looked exactly like a man skinning a flea for its hide and tallow.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the 'woman's vote' as one and indivisible.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
It is necessary that we dream now and then. No one ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
When the days begin to lengthen,
The cold begins to strengthen.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
People used to have time to live and enjoy themselves, but there is no time anymore for anything but work, work, work.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
In order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery. It makes the wheels run smoothly, and without it there is a great deal of friction and the possibility of a breakdown.

Laura Ingalls Wilder