Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.

The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.

To speak or do anything that shall concern mankind, one must speak and act as if well, or from that grain of health which he has left.

There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

I think it would be worth the while to introduce a school of children to such [an oak grove], that they may get an idea of the primitive oaks before they are all gone, instead of hiring botanists to lecture to them when it is too late.

If I am not I, who will be?