“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of feeble minds”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more."

“I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”

“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.”

“We have become the tool of our tools.”

“For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever.”

“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself, than this incessant business.”

“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. 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.”

“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

“The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.”

“I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.”

“Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.”

“I love a broad margin to my life.”

“Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?”

“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”