How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it [an oversized home].

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

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.

Late in the afternoon we passed a man on the shore fishing with a long birch pole.... The characteristics and pursuits of various ages and races of men are always existing in epitome in every neighborhood. The pleasures of my earliest youth have become the inheritance of other men. This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived.