“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”

“...an intellectual instinct which extracts the essence from the phenomena of life, as a bee sucks honey from a flower. In addition to study and reflections, life itself serves as a source.”

“And now you ask in your heart, ‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.*People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.”

“[Honey is sweet] and so is knowledge, but knowledge is like the bee that made that sweet honey, you have to chase it through the pages of a book.”

“I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.”

“It is not the bee's touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.”