A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

I see less difference between a city and a swamp than formerly.

The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands.

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last.

Christ is the prince of Reformers and Radicals.

Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or eventhe Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.