Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.

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

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

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.

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

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

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

Faith never makes a confession.

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

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

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

Let go of the past and live the future . . . Live the life you imagined.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

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

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

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

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

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

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

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

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

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

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the government machine.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

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

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.

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

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Simplify, simplify.

The press is, almost without exception, corrupt.

‘Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

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

To be awake is to be alive.

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

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.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

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

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

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

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

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

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

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.

That government is best which governs least.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

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

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

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

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

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

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

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

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

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

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

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

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

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.

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.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

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

In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed.

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.

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

Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?

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.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

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.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

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

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

What is the use of a house if you haven‘t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

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.

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

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

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

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

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.

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

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

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

The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

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

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

Simplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!

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

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.

There is no just and serene criticism as yet.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

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

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

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

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.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

I am a happy camper so I guess I’m doing something right. Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

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

I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men.

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

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

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

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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

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

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

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.

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.

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

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

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.

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

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

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.

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

The lawyer‘s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.

Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

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.

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

Things do not change; we change.

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

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man.

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

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

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

Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

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

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

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

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.