Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land,... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.

For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.