Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable; of a bad one, to make it less valuable.

It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

The only sin in the world is ignorance.

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.