I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable.

The most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.