How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.

Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!