...in the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in the streets or villages...in the woods we return to reason and faith.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

Among the map makers of each generation are the risk takers, those who see the opportunities, seize the moment and expand man's vision of the future

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

I didn't find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.