The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest. - Henry David Thoreau

The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

As travellers go round the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life, —catalogue stars, those thoughts whose orbits are as rarely calculated as comets.

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.