I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?