"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."

"God reigns when we take a liberal view, when a liberal view is presented to us."

"Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society."

"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man."

"The language of friendship is not words but meanings."

"Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought."

"What is once well done is done forever."

"The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity."

"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, never to return, -prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms...if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk."

"We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven."

"A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring."

"Where there is a brave man in the thickest of the fight there is the post of honor."

"I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines."

"It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life."

"Men are born to succeed, not to fail."

"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it."

"As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness."

"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?"

"It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature."

"Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man - a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit."

"Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent."

"Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day."

"To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle."

"The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?"

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see."

"I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness."

"To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain."

"Be not simply good - be good for something."

"Men have become the tools of their tools."

"When I would recreate myself I seek the darkest wood the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength the marrow of Nature."

"A man thinking or working will always be alone, let him be where he will."

"What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more."

"This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?"

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

"Water is the only drink for a wise man."

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

"Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling."

"In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this."

"Friends will not only live in harmony but in melody."

"Things do not change; we change."

"I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

"I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come to know that we are never alone."

"I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage."

"The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free."

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn."

"Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading."

"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? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them?"

"However mean your life is meet it 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 Paradise. Love your life."

"Some are reputed sick and some are not. It often happens that the sicker man is the nurse to the sounder."

"As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society."