I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathem...
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and t...
We are constantly invited to be what we are.
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.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
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.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
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...
What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Time...
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.
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.
On Ponkawtasset, since, we took our way,Down this still stream we took our meadowy way,A poet wise has settled, whose fine rayDoth faintly shine on Concord's twilight day.Like those first stars, whose...