You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

As for conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that. Let not your right hand know what your left hand does in that line of business. It will prove a failure.... It is a greater strain than any soul can long endure. When you get God to pulling one way, and the devil the other, each having his feet well braced,--to say nothing of the conscience sawing transversely,--almost any timber will give way.

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.

It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.

The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.