"Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap."

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"As some heads cannot carry much wine, so it would seem that I cannot bear so much society as you can. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough of it this year I shall cry all the next."

"Wildness is the preservation of the World."

"City life - millions of people being lonesome together."

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment."

"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark."

"Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends... Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."

"The eye is the jewel of the body."

"Gnaw your own bone gnaw at it bury it unearth it gnaw it still."

"Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, -"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart were hurried;Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,O'er the grave where our hero we buried."

"Nothing is so much to be feared as fear."

"This American government-what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way."

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."

"I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians."

"The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed."

"We are more of the earth,Farther from heaven these days."

"The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument."

"The silence rings-it is musical & thrills me. A night in which the silence was audible-I hear the unspeakable."

"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."

"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth."

"Beware all enterprises that require new clothes."

"I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse."

"As with our colleges, so with a hundred 'modern improvements;' there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at..."

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."

"Great men, unknown to their generation, have their fame among the great who have preceded them, and all true worldly fame subsides from their high estimate beyond the stars."

"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood."

"There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. ... A man sees only what concerns him."

"There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance."

"There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life."

"The highest law gives a thing to him who can use it."

"Every blade in the field - Every leaf in the forest - lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up."

"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."

"The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles."

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."

"In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home."

"The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected."

"Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?"

"As for Doing-good,that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberatelyforsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands ofme, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a likebut infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preservesit."

"Thu luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another."

"I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights - any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi."

"Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?"

"Never look back unless you are planning to go that way."

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life."

"We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will."

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

"Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul."

"Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him."

"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."