We soon get through with nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl farther or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.

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

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.