When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

People die of fright and live of confidence.

It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker.

Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Music is the crystallization of sound.

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.