No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

We inspire friendship in men when we have contracted friendship with the gods.

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?

He who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.