To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.

The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.

Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.

Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?

The still youthful energies of the globe have only to be directed in their proper channel.