Invariably our best nights were those when it rained.

I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

Shall I not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the granary of the birds?

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!