“How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge?”

“Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

“When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”

“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”

“As I love nature, as I love singing birds...I love thee, my friend.”

“How godlike, how immortal, is he?”

“Morning brings back the heroic ages.”

“I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men. The former are so much the freer.”

“No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world.”

“Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid.”

“The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but it is instinct.”

“Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.”

“With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.”

“Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.”

“I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant”

“One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”

“The seasons and all their changes are in me.”

“if injustice, is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

“We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!”

“There is a low mist in the woods— It is a good day to study lichens.”

“Books of natural history make the most cheerful winter reading.”

“To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.”

“Still we live meanly like ants.”

“Confucious said, To know what we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

“Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less?”

“The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”

“The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer.”

“Say what you have to say, not what you ought.”

“I am of the nature of Stone. It takes the summer’s sun to warm it.”

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

“Who hears the fishes when they cry?”

“Do not engage to find things as you think they are.”

“Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth.”

“In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.”

“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.”

“I like sometimes to take rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do.”

“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness...”

“There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”

“and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”

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

“There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.”

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

“If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame." No:”

“This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it”

“Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.”

“He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor.”

“One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate...Love must be as much a light as a flame.”

“This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

I've always tried to go a step past wherever people expected me to end up.

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.