The tavern will compare favorably with the church.
The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what we do; and yet how much is not done by us!
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East – to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them – who were above such trifling.
The traveler must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements.
Who hears the fishes when they cry?
Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.
I thought, as I have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go a- fishing. That’s the true industry for poets. It is the only trade I have learned.
All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet.
There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.
Maturity is when all of your mirrors turn into windows.
Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
As the stars looked to me when I was a shepherd in Assyria, they look to me now as a New-Englander.
I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings.
If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.
Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply; for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is, in fact, a subtle detraction.
I have travelled a good deal in Concord.
I do not know at first what it is that harms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to be fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory.
While some men believe in the infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.
Duty is one and invariable; it requires no impossibilities, nor can it ever be disregarded with impunity.