I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or abean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonelythan the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north st...
However mean your life is, meet and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradi...
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. H...
Dichtung und Mythologie des Altertums deuten darauf hin, daß die Landwirtschaft einst als eine heilige Kunst geübt wurde. Bei uns aber wird sie mit einer unbekümmerten, nachlässigen Hast betrieben, di...
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.
As surely as the sunset in my latest Novembershall translate me to the ethereal world,and remind me of the ruddy morning of youth;as surely as the last strain of music which falls on my decaying earsh...
As for clothing, [...] perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. [...] No man ever stood the lower in my estimat...
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful, while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless beside being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with, he who knows noth...
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? All men want, not something to do with, bu...
A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will.
Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything or leaves anything behind,...
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training suc...
There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.
The simple style is bad for the savage because he does worse than to obtain the luxuries of life; it is good for the philosopher because he does better than to work for them. The question is whether y...
The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.
The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjectu...
One little chore to do, one little commission to fulfil, one message to carry, would spoil heaven itself.
If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind...
I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning su...
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself, than this incessant business.