I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it.

I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me.

People seldom hit what they do not aim at.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Let nothing come between you and the light.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.