The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.

Winter is the time for study, you know, and the colder it is the more studious we are.

Whether he sleeps or wakes,--whether he runs or walks,--whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye,--a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself. Whatever he says or does, he merely reports himself. If he is in love, he loves; if he is in heaven, he enjoys; if he is in hell, he suffers. It is his condition that determines his locality.

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.