My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.

It [is of] some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life.

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.

Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap.