I heartily wish you, in the plain home-spun style, a great number of happy new years, well employed in forming both your mind and ...your manners, to be useful and agreeable to yourself, your country, and your friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable t...o our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We criticize a thinker more acutely when he advances a proposition that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonable... to do so when his proposition is agreeable to us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The honest Man has, I know, that modest Desire of Gain which is peculiar to those who understand better Things than Riches; and I ...dare say he would be contented with much less than what is called Wealth in that Quarter of the Town which he inhabits, and will oblige all his Customers with Demands agreeable to the Moderation of his Desires.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those New-Englanders who really wish to visit the seaside. At pre...sent it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search of,--if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do at Newport,--I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here. But this shore will never more be more attractive than it is now. Such beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn and Nantasket! this bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so snugly. What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a lighthouse or fisherman's hut, the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the n...umerous chinks between the boards.... Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty-...-the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indolence ... indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to t...ake the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits ...such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »