“I have heard of a minister, who had been a fisherman, being settled in Bridgewater for as long a time as he could tell a cod froma haddock. Generous as it seems, this condition would empty most country pulpits forthwith, for it is long since the fishers of men were fishermen.”

“The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.”

“It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.”

“A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.”

“But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.”

“Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.”

“The weary sun hath made a golden setAnd by the bright tract of his fiery carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.”

“Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.”

“Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords: look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

“For where is any author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?”

“Yet writers say, as in the sweetest budThe eating canter dwells, so eating loveInhabits in the finest wits of all.”

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

“And where two raging fires meet together, they do consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

“Fruits that blossom first will first be ripe.”

“Adult males are what their moms designed them.”

“Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference.”

“The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitants of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics.”

“A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.”

“Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.”

“What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?”

“Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man.”

“The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”