Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith.

I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.

Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.