Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

The prosaic man sees things badly, or with the bodily sense; but the poet sees them clad in beauty, with the spiritual sense.

We must heap up a great pile of doing, for a small diameter of being.

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.