We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.
Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.
Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.
It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
But the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art.
The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.
Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses.
When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.
I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thumoi phileousa te, kedomene te.
A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.
A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age.
It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter.
Man needs to know but little more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps.
The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one’s appetite is not too keen.
The fishermen say that the “thundering of the pond” scares the fishes and prevents their biting.
The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.
As for the dispute about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plane at the base of a mountain, instead of climbing steadily to its top.
Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them.
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period of my life; I mean that I had some.