The world rests on principles.

You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.