I find it, as ever, very unprofitable to have much to do with men. It is sowing the wind, but not reaping even the whirlwind; onlyreaping an unprofitable calm and stagnation. Our conversation is a smooth, and civil, and never-ending speculation merely.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.