It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.

All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.

To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.