“Who that has reason, and his smell, Would not among roses and jasmin dwell?”

Neither the praise nor the blame is our own.

Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?

There have been fewer friends on earth than kings.

For the whole world, without a native home, Is nothing but a prison of larger room.

The getting out of doors is the greatest part of the journey.

“We may talk what we please,” he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, “of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles

It was not sleep that made him nod, he said, But too great weight and largeness of his head.

Plenty, as well as Want, can separate friends.

Let’s banish business, banish sorrow; To the gods belong to-morrow.

The liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.

To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man’s, into the world, as it is God’s.

Acquaintance I would have, but when it depends; not on number, but the choice of friends.

Hope is the most hopeless thing of all.

Come, my best Friends! my Books! and lead me on.

Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.

Happy insect! what can be In happiness compared to thee? Fed with nourishment divine, The dewy morning’s gentle wine!

Wit lies in recognizing the resemblance among things which differ and the difference between things which are alike.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ’em.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

We moralize among ruins.