Ten percent of people can think, another ten percent of people think that they think, and eighty percent of people would rather die than be made to think.

All life is a nap. The more naps you take the better.

I quote another man's saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look,begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!

Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds andwars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, "so hot? my little Sir.