No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.
That government is best which governs least.
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
Live the life you've dreamed.
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
Those whom we can love, we can hate to others we are indifferent.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.
The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh...
What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers t...
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.
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...
How often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual friends that we may go and meet their ideal cousins.
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.
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