All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being goes to take away all right ideas.

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.

We are shut up in school and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse or a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.