"The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth."

"The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact."

"Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, 'I will simply be."

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust."

"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."

"Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated."

"In wilderness is the preservation of the world."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"I was more independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one, every moment."

"What you get by achieving your goals is as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

"Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes."

"Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost."

"It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience."

"It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious."

"It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them."

"He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life."

"I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."

"I delight to come to my bearings,-not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may,-not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me;-not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less,-not suppose a case, but take the case that is."

"It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear."

"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may Old time is still a-flying. And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying."

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"

"The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day."

"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it."

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."

"Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve."

"The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be."

"See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds."

"You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you."

"This life is not for complaint but for satisfaction."

"It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

"If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs."

"The universe is wider than our views of it."

"I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe - "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient."

"Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams."

"There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters."

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."

"How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

"Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing."

"Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?"

"God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages."

"The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering from want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got."

"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure."

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!"

"A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself-and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day."

"Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh."

"Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine."

"There is no just and serene criticism as yet."