Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts; the very undertow of our life's stream.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

In respect to religion and the healing art, all nations are still in a state of barbarism. In the most civilized countries the priest is still but a Powwow, and the physician a Great Medicine.

What a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time,--the eternal laws!

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

A simple woman down in Tyngsborough, at whose house I once stopped to get a draught of water, when I said, recognizing the bucket, that I had stopped there nine years before for the same purpose, asked if I was not a traveler, supposing that I had been traveling ever since, and had now come round again.

Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much time is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many circumstances that I may say I am unborn.