You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and...
The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men ; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tr...
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as...
Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of o...
How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it...
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.
All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so ente...
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a li...
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be.
The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like...
Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but po...
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.
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.
Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.