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

“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.

“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.”

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

“Truths and roses have thorns about them.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

“The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.”

“Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.”

“You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.”

“He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.”

“I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

“let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.”

“Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.”

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”

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

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.”