My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!

I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,--if ten honest men only,--ay, if one HONESTman, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.