"Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!"

"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion."

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."

"One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors."

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

"I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom."

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself."

"I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last."

"We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being."

"The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend."

"Philanthropy is. . . greatly overrated. A pain in the gut is not sympathy for the underprivileged, but the result of eating a green apple; the philanthropist gives to ease his own pain."

"I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now."

"Not only must we be good but we must also be good for something."

"Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

"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."

"Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits."

"If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living."

"Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulders..."

"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm."

"A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end."

"Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death."

"There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages."

"Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors."

"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."

"Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, -The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows."

"The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes that slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within.... After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries again what noble life it can make... The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise."

"God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us."

"Life in us is like the water in a river."

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

"Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after."

"A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world."

"Being is the great explainer."

"Events circumstances etc. have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown."

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance."

"This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence."

"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature."

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

"All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be."

"My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks."

"While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings."

"Truths and roses have thorns about them."

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success."

"The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness."

"What a man thinks of himself that is what determines or rather indicates his fate."

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."

"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, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."