In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.

We can conceive of nothing more fair than something which we have experienced.

The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not sendmen to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty,... it is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them.

Comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination. The imagination knows--nothing escapes its glance from out its eyry--and it controls the breast.