We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.
It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.
Never bet your money on another man’s game.
All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth.
If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it’s pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.
The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
It does not so much matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts.
She thought to herself, “This is now.” She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.
Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.
Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.
So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.
Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.
But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.
There is nothing wrong with God’s plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.
We’d never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.