Nature, even when she is scant and thin outwardly, satisfies us still by the assurance of a certain generosity at the roots.

A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.

Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.

The authority of government . . . can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.

Birds never sing in caves.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!