"In wildness is the preservation of the World."
"All that man can say or do that can possibly concern mankind is, in some shape or other, to tell the story of his love - to sing, and if he is fortunate and keeps alive he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremeties. It is such a pity that this divine creature should ever suffer from cold feet. A still greater pity that the coldness so often reches to his heart."
"There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted."
"The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. - from Civil Disobedience"
"A friend is one who takes me for what I am."
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn."
"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment."
"A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom."
"We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language."
"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
"We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
"The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form."
"It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know."
"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest."
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at its root."
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
"The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language."
"The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals."
"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do."
"The language of excitement is at best picturesque. You must be calm before you can utter oracles."
"Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
"Government never furthered any enterprise but the alacrity with which it got out of the way."
"That government is best which governs least."