Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors.
The only sin in the world is ignorance.
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.
So long as a man is faithful to himself, everything is in his favor, government, society, the very sun, moon, and stars.
I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.
Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
The church is a sort of hospital for men’s souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.
But man’s capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.
Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
You think that I am impoverishing myself withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society.
Nature is fair in proportion as the youth is pure. The heavens and the earth are one flower ; the earth is the calyx, the heavens the corolla.
Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
To inherit property is not to be born – it is to be still-born, rather.
We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.