Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses.

Every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible.

I wished only to be set down in Canada, and take one honest walk there as I might in Concord woods of an afternoon.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

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.

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

If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.