The experience of every past moment but belies the faith of each present.

A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

This generation has come into the world fatally late for some enterprises. Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us.... But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever.

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

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

There have been heroes for whom this world seemed expressly prepared, as if creation had at last succeeded; whose daily life was the stuff of which our dreams are made, and whose presence enhanced the beauty and ampleness of Nature herself.