I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.
No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all.
You don’t know your testament when you see it.
The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land.
The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.
If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services.
When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves.
The husbandman is always a better Greek than the scholar is prepared to appreciate, and the old custom still survives, while antiquarians and scholars grow gray in commemorating it.
The brave man braves nothing, nor knows he of his bravery.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.
In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead.
Tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory.
If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place!
Every sentence is the result of a long probation.
The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.
Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are constantly being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
The Indian’s intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each.
I have made a short excursion into the new world which the Indian dwells in, or is. He begins where we leave off.
I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary.
News Coverage!! As news expose rather than cover events.