It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future.

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Where is the "unexplored land" but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place--London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard--is "unexplored land," to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.