We live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, he is not beside himself, but standing in his own old shoes on thevery spot where he is, and that for the time being he will live there; but the places that have known him, they are lost,--how much anxiety and danger would vanish.

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.

Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners?

All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.

Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.