I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that 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 unexpecte...
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished...
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morni...
If some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.
I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.
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 ha...
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in par...
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.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that...
Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify.
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way
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.
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...
Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pa...