"It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?"

"It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive."

"There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature."

"Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight."

"That government is best which governs least."

"Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections."

"The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."

"We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

"I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"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."

"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."

"Faith never makes a confession."

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.."

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life."

"After the first blush of sin comes its indifference."

"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?"

"There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold."

"Simplicity simplicity simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand. ... Simplify simplify."

"Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit."

"We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect."

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand."

"The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency."

"Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify."

"That he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety."

"It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."

"For the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have."

"Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts."

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

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"Live the life you've dreamed."

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

"The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable."

"If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself."

"To be awake is to be alive."

"The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the."

"Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside."

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

"As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution."

"The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?"

"The perception of beauty is a moral test."

"I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar."

"There is not so good an understanding between any two but the exposure by the one of a serious fault in the other will produce a misunderstanding in proportion to its heinousness."

"Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction."

"In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high."

"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

"A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil."