843 Inspiring Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

Be as the sailor who keeps the polestar in his eye. By so doing we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we will maintain a true course.

I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever, At the bottom of my dream.

Every man should stand for a force which is perfectly irresistible.

We communicate like the burrows of foxes, in silence and darkness, under ground. We are undermined by faith and love.

Can there be any greater reproach than an idle learning? Learn to split wood, at least.

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.

Make no mistake, without Hinduism, India has no future.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.

Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even,- for that is the seat of sympathy,-he forthwith sets about reforming the world.

Every man must walk to the beat of his own drummer.

Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics.

It is dry, hazy June weather. We are more of the earth, farther from heaven these days.

They take great pride in making their dinner cost much; I take my pride in making my dinner cost so little.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.

How few are aware that in winter, when the earth is covered with snow and ice...the sunset is double. The winter is coming when I shall walk the sky.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

It is the man determines what is said, not the words.

The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most of life.... How to extract its honey from the flower of the world.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky.

There is no treatment for adore, but to love far more.

The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives.

You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

The greater number of men are merely corporals.

Christ is the prince of Reformers and Radicals.

I have no designs on society, or nature, or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past, and anticipate the future. I love to live.

All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.

Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

If you would be chaste, you must be temperate.

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good.

The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

I have been breaking silence these twenty-three years and have hardly made a rent in it.

Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.

I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.

It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!

Scholars are wont to sell their birthright for a mess of learning.

The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!

One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. To dwell long upon them is to add to the offense.

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.

Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.

Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present.

How shall we account for our pursuits, if they are original? We get the language with which to describe our various lives out of acommon mint.

I look upon England today as an old gentleman who is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has accumulated fromlong housekeeping, which he has not the courage to burn.

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

When the far mountains are invisible, the near ones look the higher.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.

Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.

The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

The mass of men are very easily imposed on. They have their runways in which they always travel, and are sure to fall into any pit or box-trap set therein.

There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.

The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.

Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars.

Oh, one world at a time!

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

One should be always on the trail of one's own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.

So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

If common sense had been consulted, how many marriages would never have taken place; if uncommon or divine sense, how few marriages such as we witness would ever have taken place!

Satan from one of his elevations, showed mankind the kingdom of California, and they entered into a compact with him at once.

A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart.

Life in us is like the water in a river.

How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.

Ninety-nine one-hundredths of our lives we are mere hedgers and ditchers, but from time to time we meet with reminders of our destiny.

So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the place of the old.

The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination,whose vast abdomens betray them.

I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.

In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.

No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.

In the wilderness is the salvation of the world.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.

I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.

I did not know that we had ever quarreled.

Man emulates earth Earth emulates heaven Heaven emulates the Way The way emulates nature.

When was it that men agreed to respect the appearance and not the reality?

Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.

A journal, is a book that shall contain a record of all your joy, your ecstasy, what you are grateful for.

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.

But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions.

What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter.

The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.

The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.

A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all respects a good subject of the Turkish government.

A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.

Men spend the best parts of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

All good things are wild and free.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.

The inhabitants of the Cape generally do not complain of their "soil," but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry their fish on.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

The foul slime stands for the sloth and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it, for the purity and courage which are immortal.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.

Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

An unclean person is universally a slothful one.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

As the least drop of wine tinges the whole goblet, so the least particle of truth colors our whole life.

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that man's life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.

I stand in awe of my body.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

Pity the man who has a character to support -- it is worse than a large family -- he is silent poor indeed.

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks.

I am amused to see from my window here how busily a man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at his puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.

Truth, Goodness, Beauty -- those celestial thrins,Continually are born; e'en now the Universe,With thousand throats, and eke with greener smiles,Its joy confesses at their recent birth.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.

An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or not.

The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.

Insane!... Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane?

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer; but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless.

Give me a country where it is the most natural thing in the world for a government that does not understand you to let you alone.

The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you.

I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.

My soul and body have tottered along together of late, tripping and hindering one another like unpracticed Siamese twins.

Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high As I can now discern with this clear eye.

Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

The world, which the Greeks called Beauty, has been made such by being gradually divested of every ornament which was not fitted to endure.

We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature.

Hinduism is the soil into which India's roots are stuck and torn out of that she will inevitably wither as a tree torn out from its place.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself alive.

There are theoretical reformers at all times, and all the world over, living on anticipation.

I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

Hold fast to your most indefinite, waking dream.

You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.

We loiter in winter while it is already spring.

The same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck.

Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.

Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

Friendship is never established as an understood relation. It is a miracle which requires constant proofs. It is an exercise of the purest imagination and of the rarest faith!

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you.

For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction.

The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no lying nor vain epitaphs.

It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.

If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.

All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

When you travel to the Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When you knock, ask to see God, -- none of the servants.

I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest. I lie and relie on the earth.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight,

New earths and skies and seas around,

And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience.

Trees indeed have hearts.

Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.

Friendship is evanescent in every man's experience, and remembered like heat lightning in past summers.

It is very rare that you meet with obstacles in this world, which the humblest man has not faculties to surmount.

When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another.

There is ripe fruit over your head.

Write while the heat is in you.

Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness- stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach and four.

There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

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.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

Friends… they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which itis destined to receive thence.

The child should have the advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge, and is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure.

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

But the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art.

To say that God has given a man many and great talents frequently means that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands.

Your richest veins don't lie nearest the surface.

Everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

Be not anxious to avoid poverty. In this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown.

On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.

I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.

Live in each season as it passes: breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit.

As they say in geology, time never fails, there is always enough of it, so I may say, criticism never fails.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.

Especially the transcendental philosophy needs the leaven of humor to render it light and digestible.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

Seeds, there are seeds enough which need only be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor.

Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

One chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society.

Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.

Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the savagestands on the unelastic plank of famine.

I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned.

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

There is reason in the distinction of civil and uncivil. The manners are sometimes so rough a rind that we doubt whether they cover any core or sap-wood at all.

As I go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing.

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

All expression of truth does at length take this deep ethical form.

Being is the great explainer.

The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one.

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

The gifts of Heaven are never quite gratuitous.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

The voice of nature is always encouraging.

The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?

Good religious men, with the love of men in their hearts, and the means to pay their toll in their pockets.

The great poem must have the stamp of greatness as well as its essence.

Our taste is too delicate and particular. It says nay to the poet's work, but never yea to his hope.

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves.

The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while.

Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

The vessel, though her masts be firm,Beneath her copper bears a worm.

The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it.

The fault finder will find faults even in paradise and thereby miss the joys that recognition of the positives bring.

As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.

The lover wants no partiality. He says, Be so kind as to be just.

I do not know at first what it is that harms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to be fairer and truer in to-morrow's memory.

We find it difficult to choose our direction because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.

Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar or fall.

The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.

Unless we do more than simply learn the trade of our time, we are but apprentices, and not yet masters of the art of life.

What youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside.

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.

The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommend it to me.

The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but it is instinct.

Every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food.

We cannot put a noose around another man's neck without first hanging ourselves.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.

The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.

Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.

If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

Perfect sincerity and transparency make a great part of beauty, as in dewdrops, lakes, and diamonds.

The sort of morality which the priests inculcate is a very subtle policy, far finer than the politicians', and the world is very successfully ruled by them as the policemen.

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

One must maintain a little bit of summer even in the middle of winter.

If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me as an idler.

I think that no experience which I have today comes up to, or is comparable with, the experiences of my boyhood.

You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.

In the long run, you hit only what you aim at.

Truth is always paradoxical.

I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect...always when I have done I feel it would have been better if I had not fished.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the lawmaker.

The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely.

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener.

A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected.

Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits.

I should have liked to come across a large community of pines, which had never been invaded by the lumbering army.

Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

In proportion as a person simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude.

Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

When any real progress is made, we unlearned and learn anew what we thought we knew before.

Love is no individual's experience; and though we are imperfect mediums, it does not partake of our imperfection; though we are finite, it is infinite and eternal.

Consider what stuff history is made of, -- that for the most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity.

If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.

I would give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision.

The present hour is always wealthiest when it is poorer than the future ones, as that is the pleasantest site which affords the pleasantest prospect.

I do not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster.

March to the beat of your own drummer.

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds.

In the unbending of the arm to do the deed there is experience worth all the maxims in the world.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.

When I would go a-visiting, I find that I go off the fashionable street, -- not being inclined to change my dress, -- to where man meets man, and not polished shoe meets shoe.

Give me a Wildness whose glance no civilization can endure.

Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

When you knock, ask to see God -- none of the servants.

The most difficult thing to understand during conversation is silence.

I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true; and they do not always mean what they say.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.

Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

Nothing makes the earth so spacious as to have friends at a distance.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.

We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.

Today...the bluebirds, old and young, have revisited their box, as if they would fain repeat the summer without intervention of winter, if Nature would let them.

My greatest skill in life has been to want but little.

We need the tonic of wildness.

How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends, that we might go and meet their ideal cousins.

I make myself rich by making my wants few.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath.

What's the railroad to me? I never go to see Where it ends. It fills a few hollows, And makes banks for the swallows, It sets the sand a-blowing, And the blackberries a-growing.

How did these beautiful rainbow tints get into the shell of the freshwater clam buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river? Even the sea-bottom tells of the upper skies.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

One who knew how to appropriate the true value of this world would be the poorest man in it. The poor rich man! all he has is whathe has bought.

Be it life or death, we crave only reality.

Most people dread finding out when they come to die that they have never really lived.

In their daily life, all are braver than they know.

Nature is an admirable schoolmistress.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man.

If however the law is so promulgated that it of necessity makes you an agent of injustices against another, then I say to you ... break the law.

The only sin in the world is ignorance.

The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Being a teacher is like being in jail; once it's on your record, you can never get rid of it.

It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.

Friends will be much apart. They will respect more each other's privacy than their communion.

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.

Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping.

In some pictures of Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

The forests are held cheap after the white pine has been culled out; and the explorers and hunters pray for rain only to clear theatmosphere of smoke.

Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.

In some countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.

I was daily intoxicated, yet no man could call me intemperate.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?

Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.

And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt?

In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

When I visit again some haunt of my youth, I am glad to find that nature wears so well. The landscape is indeed something real, and solid, and sincere, and I have not put my foot through it yet.

There never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there should be.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor.

Life is so short that it is not wise to take roundabout ways, nor can we spend much time in waiting.... We have not got half-way to dawn yet.

The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

How many a poor immortal soul I have met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it an oversized home.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid.

The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen.

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

Every child begins the world again.

Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.

I have learned that even the smallest house can be a home.

One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.

Endeavor to live the life you have imagined.

Truly, our greatest blessings are very cheap.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Man's moral nature is a riddle which only eternity can solve.

He who receives an injury is to some extent an accomplice of the wrong-doer.

The sacredness, if there is any, is all in yourself and not in the place.

I do not wish, it happens, to be associated with Massachusetts, either in holding slaves or in conquering Mexico. I am a little better than herself in these respects.

At present our only true names are nicknames.

Be true to your work your word and your friend.

Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Far from New England's blustering shore,New England's worm her hulk shall bore,And sink her in the Indian seas,Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.

Deep are the foundations of sincerity. Even stone walls have their foundation below the frost.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

We live but a fraction of our lives.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.

How earthy old people become -- moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their present pursuit.

Never trust any thought arrived at sitting down.

First, there is the power of the Wind, constantly exerted over the globe... Here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it.

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

While the Governor, and the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are at large, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Not secondary to the sun, she gives us his blaze again, Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day... In Heaven queen she is among the spheres; She, mistress-like, makes all things to be pure.

One is wise to cultivate the tree that bears fruit in our soul.

This world is but a canvas for our imagination.

The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

The man who does not betake himself at once and desperately to sawing is called a loafer, though he may be knocking at the doors of heaven all the while.

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

To be a philosopher... is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

Tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory.

The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand within it.

The mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring his arch of faith from.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.

A man of fine perceptions is more truly feminine than a merely sentimental woman.

The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

Be yourself -- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be.

When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.

It is not enough that we are truthful; we must cherish and carry out high purposes to be truthful about.

In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind.

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings, --
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.

In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.

The inhabitants of Canada appeared to be suffering between two fires, -- the soldiery and the priesthood.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Impulse is, after all, the best linguist; its logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, cannot fail to be most convincing.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.

What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?

All endeavour calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil.

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Are you in want of amusement nowadays? Then play a little at the game of getting a living. There was never anything equal to it. Do it temperately, though, and don't sweat.

I learned to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society.

The nonchalance and dolce-far-niente air of nature and society hint at infinite periods in the progress of mankind.

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.

A stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province.

A modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age.

In the summer we lay up a stock of experiences for the winter, as the squirrel of nuts?something for conversation in winter evenings.

I know of no redeeming qualities in myself but a sincere love for some things, and when I am reproved I fall back on to this ground.

The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.

Poverty ... It is life near the bone, where it is sweetest.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.

I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.

Nothing but great antiquity can make graveyards interesting to me. I have no friends there.

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.

Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

There are two seasons when the leaves are in their glory, their green and perfect youth in June and this their ripe old age.

Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all.

A simple and independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince.

Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.

Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.

Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick, and make fouler still with its slime?

To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

Many old people receive pensions for no other reason, it seems to me, but as a compensation for having lived a long time ago.

The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of. The mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July.

The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.

The young pines springing up in the corn-fields from year to year are to me a refreshing fact.

We fritter away our energy and creativity ...
we get bogged down in the thick of thin things.

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.

Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The tavern will compare favorably with the church.

As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

The most attractive sentences are not perhaps the wisest, but the surest and soundest.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

It is no more dusky in ordinary nights than our mind's habitual atmosphere, and the moonlight is as bright as our most illuminatedmoments are.

Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll go canoeing.

News Coverage! As news expose rather than cover events.

What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil -- coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours ... but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.

When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Society is commonly too cheap.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

It enriches us infinitely to recognize greater qualities than we possess in another.

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.

God is alone,-but the devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion.

In short, all good things are wild and free.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

We are all of us more or less active physiognomists.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

New earths, new themes expect us.

We must take root; send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day.

Wealth can't buy heath, but heath can buy wealth.

I derive no pleasure from talking with a young woman simply because she has regular features.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

It is good even to be a fisherman in summer and in winter.

The true harvest of my life is intangible -- a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

Humility, like the darkness, reveals the heavenly lights.

The way by which you may get money almost without exception leads downward.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg, by the side of which more will be laid.

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

Spring-an experience in immortality.

Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.

Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.

Good deeds are no less good because their object is unworthy.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

All good things are wild and free.

I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

When the true criminals are running around free, the only honorable place for a decent human being is in prisons.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, inTruro.

I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.

There is more religion in men's science, than there is science in their religion.

In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.

Wildness is the preservation of the world.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.

We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

We are constantly invited to be who we are.

Faith never makes a confession.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

We must have infinite faith in each other. If we have not, we must never let it leak out that we have not.

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

How can he remember well his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge?

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

That government is best which governs least.

I should consider it a greater success to interest one wise and earnest soul, than a million unwise and frivolous.

Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them -- that it was a vain endeavor?

I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.

Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.

The stars are distant and unobtrusive, but bright and enduring as our fairest and most memorable experiences.

What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?

As far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

As polishing expresses the vein in marble, and grain in wood, so music brings out what of heroic lurks anywhere. The hero is the sole patron of music.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

Renew thyself completely each day.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

Let go of the past and go for the future.

What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." -- .

Morning glory is the best name, it always refreshes me to see it.

And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.

This is the month of nuts and nutty thoughts,--that November whose name sounds so bleak and cheerless. Perhaps its harvest of thought is worth more than all the other crops of the year.

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.

The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkledtrophy.

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God's lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.

Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree.

Spring. March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers.

It is not worth while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!

Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in.

The is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

My Thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite -- only a sense of existence.

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still.

A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.

If India's own children do not cling to her faith, who shall guard it? India alone can save India and India and Hinduism are one.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.

Simplicity is the law of nature for men as well as for flowers.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

Even in civilized communities, the embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.

One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve.

Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there?

Do not despair of your life. You have force enough to overcome your obstacles.

Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.

It would be no reproach to a philosopher, that he knew the future better than the past, or even than the present. It is better worth knowing.

Time is like a handful of sand -- the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers.

God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.

Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.

The universe expects every man to do his duty in his parallel of latitude.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

The man who thrusts his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself.

You may raise enough money to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business.

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behaviour as well as application.

Decay and disease are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish and the hectic glow of consumption.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

Yet we must try the harder, the less the prospect of success.

A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it.

There have been some nations who could do nothing but construct tombs, and these are the only traces which they have left. They are the heathen.

In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue.

The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

It is desirable that a man live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that if an enemy take the town. He can walk out the gate empty handed and without anxiety.

With wisdom we shall learn liberality.

Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.

Music never stops; it is only the listening that is intermittent.

The imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

As a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return -- sending back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.

Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

The secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in mind.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

How many things are now at loose ends! Who knows which way the wind will blow tomorrow?

Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all.

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in a revery.

The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

A man's whole life is taxed for the least thing well done. It is its net result.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.

On every hand we observe a truly wise practice, in education, in morals, and in the arts of life, the embodied wisdom of many an ancient philosopher.

I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified.

I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent, our very life is our disgrace.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.