We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes b...
There is a low mist in the woods—It is a good day to study lichens.
The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over bytheir predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things tohave been cared for. According to Evelyn, the wise Solomon...
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.
The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.
Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap.
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said...
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or streeet, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and ev...
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood...
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to bec...
I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better lea...
I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his 'furniture,' as whether it is insured or not. 'But what shall I do with my f...
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to so...
But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible live free and uncommitted.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his...