The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
Live the life you've dreamed.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I ha...
You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.
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...
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Coulda greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other'seyes for an instant?
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them
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 we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.
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 demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
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 may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.
We are a race of tit-men...
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about m...
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.
They who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.