The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

The poet's, commonly, is not a logger's path, but a woodman's. The logger and pioneer have preceded him, like John the Baptist; eaten the wild honey, it may be, but the locusts also; banished decaying wood and the spongy mosses which feed on it, and built hearths and humanized Nature for him.

We cannot put a noose around another man's neck without first hanging ourselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine...So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.