“I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.”

“The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”

“I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a passtime, if we live simply and wisely”

“One little chore to do, one little commission to fulfil, one message to carry, would spoil heaven itself.”

“Man is an animal who more than any other can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances.”

“Beauty is where it is perceived. When I see the sun shinning on the woods across the pond, I think this side the richer which sees it.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

“Men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men.”

“I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

“A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.”

“I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.”

“Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.”

“Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one.”

“If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.”

“There are thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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