By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

As if there were safety in stupidity alone

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.

The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.