Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed dawn to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather.

I am a majority of one.

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.