My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into.
If the devil doesn’t exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they’re smart enough to be?
We weren’t allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.
He loved the woods, where it seemed to him that every life was secret, including his own.
This religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me.