“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life”

“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

“But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.”

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”

“Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.”

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.”

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

“He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.”

“Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.”

“In the long run, we only hit what we aim at.”

“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

“The only remedy for love is to love more.”

“There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.”

“He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair.”

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”

“I do not know how to distinguish between waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?”

“While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”

“The greatest art is to shape the quality of the day. ”

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

“As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.”