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 moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branchi...
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies
The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature.
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 sunrisetill noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,in undisturbed solitude an...
Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.
I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.
I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and I'm sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as another. However intens...
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 love a broad margin to my life.
I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instill...
De la literatura sólo nos atrae lo salvaje. El aburrimiento no es sino otro nombre para lo domesticado.
Confucius said, To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
As for Doing-good,that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I shoul...