Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.

I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

If you give money, spend yourself with it.