Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

As we grow older, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves.

The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World