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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds,
Exhilarate the spirit, and restore
The tone of languid nature.
~William Cowper


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


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


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


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