I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?

We are ashamed of our fear; for we know that a righteous man would not suspect danger nor incur any. Wherever a man feels fear, there is an avenger.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.