There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy; and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds; the whisper of groves; and the murmur of rivulets. ~Samuel Johnson


I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. ~Sydney Smith


When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering; I say to myself Yes indeed; all that belongs to me!? ~Henri Rousseau


I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. ~Vita Sackville-West; Country Notes


It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book. ~Cyril Connolly; The Unquiet Grave; 1945


Anybody can be good in the country. ~Oscar Wilde; The Picture of Dorian Gray


People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward; and I get angry; as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls; and that it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow. ~George William Russell


God made the country; and man made the town. ~William Cowper; The Task


When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. ~William Hazlitt; Table Talk


I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. ~Leonardo da Vinci


Ironically; rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher quality of life not because of what it has; but rather because of what it does not have!? ~Don A. Dillman


My father asserted that there was no better place to bring up a family than in a rural environment.... There's something about getting up at 5 a.m.; feeding the stock and chickens; and milking a couple of cows before breakfast that gives you a lifelong respect for the price of butter and eggs. ~Bill Vaughan


As much as I converse with sages and heroes; they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene; for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children. ~John Adams