We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new understanding of life.

When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street,--not being inclined to change my dress,--to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.

When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.