Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.
How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!
The world rests on principles.
It is not enough to be a hardworking person. Equally important is the job you are working at.
We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.
It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.
I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.
You never gain something but that you lose something.
The devil finds work for idle hands.
As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.
The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.
I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.
Fire is the most tolerable third party.
I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.
A little thought is sexton to all the world.
My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.