What wealth is it to have such friends that we cannot think of them without elevation!

Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life?

The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see - i.e. compare it to, something worse or better, that determines whether you are respectively grateful and happy or ungrateful and bitter.

I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor.