With what infinite & unwearied expectation and proclamations the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step...
When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do.
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...
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, They do not make them so now, not emphasizing the They at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, a...
What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can old man, — you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,– I hear an irresistible voice which invit...
We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.
Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
They required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still.
There are other, savager, and more primeval aspects of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry. Homer and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how th...
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.
The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not likethe azure ether beyond.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do...How vigilant we are! determined not live by faith if we...
The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the...
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers ha...