Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry intotheir secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains,--their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb the summit of Ktaadn.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.