"As for the great problems, we have no advantage over our ancestors or our more recent predecessors: men have always known everything, at least in what concerns the Essential."
"I believe that this feeling for the hearth, for the immemorial lares and penates, is infinitely stronger in Baltimore than in New York — that it has better survived there, indeed, than in any other large city of America."
"One day, when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger and black, fiercely contending with one another..."
"The return to the simple life can be regarded as an unhoped-for piece of good fortune even though it demands considerable self-sacrifice and is not undertaken voluntarily."
"Now I am alone — oh, how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sighs; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none."