"However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
"We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect."
"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains."
"Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion."
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."
"The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me."
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."
"I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is."
"Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style peculiarly his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones."
"Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man."
"The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness."
"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."
"I always entertain great hopes."
"It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. If he is more than a popular story-teller it may take humanity a generation to absorb and grow accustomed to the new geography with which the scientist or artist presents us. Even then, perhaps only the more imaginative and literate may accept him. Subconsciously the genius is feared as an image breaker; frequently he does not accept the opinions of the mass, or man's opinion of himself."
"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer."
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
"Men have become the tools of their tools."
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."
"We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as w"
"Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us."
"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."
"The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, and of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains."
"Nature never did betray The heart that loved her."
"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."
"He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life."
"The best way out is always through."
"Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty."
"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."
"There are now-a-days professors of philosophy but not philosophers."
"I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see."
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway."
"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."
"What a man thinks of himself, that is what determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
"It's not enough to be busy. The question is: what are we busy about?"
"The universe is wider than our views of it."
"When I had mapped the pond ... I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth."
"What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."
"Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of the mind alone."
"Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found out it was ourselves."
"In times when the government imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also the prison."
"The man for whom law exists - the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man."
"Keep close to Nature's heart ... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."
"The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."
"What is called genius is the abundance of life and health."
"Government never furthered any enterprise but the alacrity with which it got out of the way."
"I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors."
"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
"Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something."