"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 mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready"
"Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces"
"Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day"
"That government is best which governs least"
"It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature"
"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes"
"I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society"
"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment"
"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth"
"Things do not change; we change"
"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted"
"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"
"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion"
"How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it"
"There 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"
"Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are"
"May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!"
"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after"
"Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men"
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen"
"I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born"
"I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls"
"How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them"
"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?"
"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success"
"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it"
"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it"
"Is the babe young? When I behold it, it seems more venerable than the oldest man"
"In wilderness is the preservation of the world"
"We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see"
"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself"
"How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?"
"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"
"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves"
"It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil"
"It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things"
"In the meanest are all the materials of manhood, only they are not rightly disposed"
"In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society"
"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"
"Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else"
"We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being"
"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living"
"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once"
"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"
"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals"
"What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new"
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us"
"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
