The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
Only the defeated and deserters go to war.
Our science, so called, is always more barren and mixed with error than our sympathies.
There are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or inlet, yet unexplored by him.
My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.
The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.
If men were to be destroyed and the books they have written were to be transmitted to a new race of creatures, in a new world, what kind of record would be found in them of so remarkable a phenomenon as the rainbow?
The Library is a wilderness of books.
There is always room and occasion enough for a true book on any subject; as there is room for more light the brightest day and more rays will not interfere with the first.
The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.
As in many countries precious metals belong to the crown, so here more precious natural objects of rare beauty should belong to the public.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!
Most men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum – many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth!
Who is old enough to have learned from experience?
The value of any experience is measured, of course, not by the amount of money, but the amount of development we get out of it.
I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.
Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.