A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.

For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.