The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.
The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
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...
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii...
Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.
Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
ONLY THE DAY DAWNS TO WHICH WE ARE AWAKE,IF WE ARE TO GRASP THE REALITY OF OUR LIFE WHILE WE HAVE IT,WE WILL NEED TO WAKE UP TO OUR MOMENTS,OTHERWISE,WHOLE DAYS,EVEN A WHOLE LIFE COULD SLIP BY UNNOTIC...
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. Do you wish to buy any baskets? he asked. No, we do not want any, was the reply. What! e...
No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in...
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.
It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.
Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them.
In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment...
In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even its most fantastic and fainte...
If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.
If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.
I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do.
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in di...