Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction, but only at whatis inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer.