I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me tobe doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.

I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. I buy but a few things, and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them I am prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.

I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.

The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.

A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.