“Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.”

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”

“But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life”

“The true harvest of my life is intangible - a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.”

“A gun will give you the body, not the bird”

“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

“Read not the Times, read the Eternities.”

“A man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of life getting his living.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.”

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

“No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.”

“What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.”

“There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”

“Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!”

“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors”

“Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ”

“A man can suffocate on courtesy.”

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”

“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.”

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”

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

“I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”

“Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.”

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

“We should impart our courage and not our despair.”

“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.”

“The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.”

“If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.”

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

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

“Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.”

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.”

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

“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.”

“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”

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

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

“I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune.”

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”

“Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.”

“Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare”

“It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”

“Be not simply good; be good for something.”