He who owns little is little owned.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

What is sour in the house a bracing walk in the woods makes sweet.

It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction - a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the muse.

A man sees only what concerns him.... How much more, then, it requires different intentions of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at objects!

To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions.