Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us.

What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men-to be free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or bow much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?