He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometime...
We are but faint-hearted crusaders...our expeditions are but tours...half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure,...
Thoreau the Patron Saint of Swamps because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most im...
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human life...
By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is w...
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good be good for something.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rar...
We know but few man, a great many coats and breeches.
The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern wo...
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
A distinguished clergyman told me that he chose the profession of a clergyman because it afforded the most leisure for literary pursuits. I would recommend to him the profession of a governor.
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first...
It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware...
It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.