I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions."

We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most of life.... How to extract its honey from the flower of the world.

Let us consider under what disadvantages Science has hitherto labored before we pronounce thus confidently on her progress.