How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

It is tranquil people who accomplish much.

It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor