I learned what it is to live in the open air, and I learned that our lives are domestic in more sense than we think.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again."

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.

If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels.