“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.”

“We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,”

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

“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

“The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.”

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.”

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.”

“He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established.”

“It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.”

“My life has been the poem I could have writ But I could not both live and utter it.”

“When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do.”

“To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.”

“Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.”

“The stars are God's dreams, thoughts remembered in the silence of his night.”

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

“I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

“The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”

“We live a short period of time in this world, but we live it according to the laws of eternal life.”

“Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?”

“We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven”

“While men believe in the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.”

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

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

“It has come to this, that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave.”

“Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?”

“Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.”

“A lawyer's truth is not Truth. It is consistency, or consistent expediency”