Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Only the defeated and deserters go to war.

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.

What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.

A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.