The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is incredibly beautiful, too fair to be remembered. I have had thoughts about it, but they are among the most fleeting and irrecoverable in my experience.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. Our life is frittered away by detail. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

How full of the creative genius is the air in which these [snowflakes] are generated! I should hardly admire them more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius. Full of the divinity. So that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.