"The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning."

"The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it."

"Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces."

"As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down stream like a dead dog. Vast hollow chambers of silence stretched away on every side, and my being expanded in proportion, and filled them. Then first could I appreciate sound, and find it musical."

"How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?"

"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once."

"The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it."

"Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows."

"But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party."

"I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society."

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."

"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality."

"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"

"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it."

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."

"The heart is forever inexperienced."

"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself."

"I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes."

"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well."

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."

"Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then."

"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully."

"When I hear music I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest."

"I have thought there was some advantage even in death, by which we mingle with the herd of common men."

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."

"Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men."

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"It's only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God."

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."

"Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are."

"There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone."

"They who suspect a Mephistophiles, or sneering, satirical devil, under all, have not learned the secret of true humor, which sympathizes with gods themselves, in view of their grotesque, half-finished creatures."

"What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party."

"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living."

"How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?"

"The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state....The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard."

"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."

"We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches."

"I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour."

"To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it."

"For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully though I never received one cent for it."

"Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."

"Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe."

"If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?"

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."

"It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise."

"We must have infinite faith in each other."

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