Nothing is so sure to make itself known as the truth, for what else waits to be known? - Henry David Thoreau

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you, —returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.