I make it my business to extract from Nature what ever nutriment she can furnish me.... I milk the sky and the earth.

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.

And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain.

No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.