All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,--and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.

He is the rich man, and enjoys the fruit of his riches, who summer and winter forever can find delight in his own thoughts.

This is one of those instances in which the individual genius is found to consent, as indeed it always does, at last, with the universal.

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.