“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

“I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, anymore than I would have every acre of earth cultivated.”

“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors”

“I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

“I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day the sun has shown on the surface of some savage swamp, where the double spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath; and now a more dismal and fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there.”

“Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.”

“You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body”