Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,--at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives onthe sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.

The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,--chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.