"In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, - no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair."

"Science does not know its debt to imagination."

"Nothing external to you has any power over you."

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

"If you shoot at a king you must kill him."

"Marriage is the perfection of what love aimed at, ignorant of what it sought."

"O Lord! Unhappy is the man whom man can make unhappy."

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

"Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."

"Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression."

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."

"All men are poets at heart."

"A good indignation brings out all one's powers."

"Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is."

"The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides."

"We are born believing. A man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples."

"The condition which high friendship demands is the ability to do without it."

"Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes by making them the fruit of his character."

"The power which resides in man is new in nature and none but he knows what that is which he can do nor does he until he has tried."

"Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it."

"The peace of the man who has foresworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace but a canting impotence."

"We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us."

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

"I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways."

"Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural."

"Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words."

"The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind."

"There are some men above grief and some men below it."

"For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."

"People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others."

"When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something."

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."

"There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet."

"The high prize of life the crowning fortune of man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness."

"Do the thing and you will have the power."

"Life consists of what man is thinking about all day."

"A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation."

"The surest poison is time."

"The poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will."

"A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man."

"As we grow old, the beauty steals inward."

"He has not learned the first lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear."

"God screens us evermore from premature ideas."

"Love, and you shall be loved."

"Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity."

"Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man."

"Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries."

"There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich who want something more that of the sick who want something different and that of the traveler who says "Anywhere but here.""

"Poverty Frost Famine Rain Disease are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense."