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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Who hears the fishes when they cry?”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Still we live meanly like ants.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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