“Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!”

“Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”

“Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”

“Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”

“Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”

“My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.”

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

“In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world. ”

“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

“O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

“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.”

“Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure”

“Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.”

“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a second at control, Or useful serving-man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

“Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.” “Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”

“To affect the quality of the day - that is the highest of the arts.”

“Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”

“Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it.”

“Morning is when I'm awake, and there is dawn in me.”

“Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails.”

“Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.”

“Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”

“Truths and roses have thorns about them.”

“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees”

“A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.”

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

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.”

“Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life, as a dog does his master’s chaise. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

“Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.”

“The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies”

“In short, all good things are wild and free.”

“In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.”

“To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.”

“Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.”

“There is no beginning too small.”

“Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made”

“We know but few man, a great many coats and breeches.”

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

“Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. The shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown.”

“It's too late to be studying Hebrew; it's more important to understand even the slang of today.”

“I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.”

“How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?”

“Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.”

“We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.”

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me”

“A man sits as many risks as he runs.”