Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain.

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youths so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide.