You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying or inquisitive, not bent on seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

He listens equally to the prayers of the believer and the unbeliever.

The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination,whose vast abdomens betray them.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

But it is rather derogatory that your dwelling-place should be only a neighborhood to a great city,--to live on an inclined plane.I do not like their cities and forts, with their morning and evening guns, and sails flapping in one's eye. I want a whole continent to breathe in, and a good deal of solitude and silence, such as all Wall Street cannot buy,--nor Broadway with its wooden pavement. I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea,--and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.