The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.
There is no scent in it so wholesome as that of the pines, nor any fragrance so penetrating and restorative as the life-everlasting in high pastures.
They make their pride, he said, in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little. When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, The nearest.
They required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still.
Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable educa...
Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.
We are a race of tit-men...
We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what i...
What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massa...
Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.
May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.
The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.
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