Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct? All our lives want a suitable background. They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in a desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined...

So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

Between whom there is hearty truth there is love.

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have...but shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?