Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
With what infinite & unwearied expectation and proclamations the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
When he read James Wilkinson's book The Human Body in 1851, Thoreau was impressed. Wilkinson's book, he wrote in his journal, to some extent realizes what I have dreamed of, -a return to the primitive...
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are...
We should be men first, and subjects afterward.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encourag...
We might climb a tree, at least.
We commonly do not remember that it is … always the first person that is speaking.
Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
The universe is wider than our views of it.
The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of his night.
The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wav...
The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest o...
The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake...
The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering from want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it w...
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude...
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.
Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?