Quote collection
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"The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me."
"Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."
"I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified."
"I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business called me thither."
"I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold."
"It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days."
"Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses."
"The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets."
"The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes."
"The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them,-though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,-that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed."
"The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest."
"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us."
"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."
"By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses."
"By what a delicate and far-stretched contribution every island is made! What an enterprise of nature thus to lay the foundations of and to build up the future continent, of golden and silver sands and the ruins of forests, with ant-like industry."
"There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east."
"Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as if it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already."
"When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?"
"There is nothing more difficult to find than oneself."
"The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams."