The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.

Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.

Maturity is when all of your mirrors turn into windows.

One can hardly imagine a more healthful employment, or one more favorable to contemplation and the observation of nature.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

As a preacher, I should be prompted to tell men, not so much how to get their wheat bread cheaper, as of the bread of life compared with which that is bran. Let a man only taste these loaves, and he becomes a skillful economist at once.