A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.

Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal, and universally successful. In this case it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.

However much we admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or abovethe fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.