The question is not what you look at – but how you look & whether you see.

On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.

When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.

The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.

Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable result. No professions nor advances will avail.... It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.

Sweep away the clutter of things that complicate our lives.

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry intotheir secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. Simple races, as savages, do not climb mountains,--their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb the summit of Ktaadn.