Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would ... [be] the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.