It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.

I see less difference between a city and a swamp than formerly.

I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.

We should impart our courage and not our despair.

You must not count much upon what I can do or learn in New York.... Everything there disappoints me but the crowd; rather, I was disappointed with the rest before I came. I have no eyes for their churches, and what else they find to brag of. Though I know but little about Boston, yet what attracts me, in a quiet way, seems much meaner and more pretending than there,--libraries, pictures, and faces in the street. You don't know where any respectability inhabits.

Nature refuses to sympathize with our sorrow. She seems not to have provided for, but by a thousand contrivances against it.