How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem harbor, will be fixture enough.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success.
Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moonnor firefly has shown me the causeway to it.
In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.
I was awakened at midnight by some heavy, low-flying bird, probably a loon, flapping by close over my head, along the shore. So, turning the other side of my half-clad body to the fire, I sought slumber again.
The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.
Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.
I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold.
Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious.
Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?
The Great Snow! How cheerful it is to hear of!
No people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their fathers might have been to them.
It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you.
There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.
Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it.
Hate can pardon more than love.