We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.
If words were invented to conceal thought, newspapers are a great improvement of a bad invention.
I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays.
The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.
The music of all creatures has to do with their loves, even of toads and frogs. Is it not the same with man?
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil, – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.
Nature would not appear so rich, the profusion so rich, if we knew a use for everything.
Nature has left nothing to the mercy of man.
I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted.
Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe.
How imperceptibly the first springing takes place!
No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of spring.
Spring. March fans it, April christens it, and May puts on its jacket and trousers.
In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.
The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!
The first pleasant days of spring come out like a squirrel and go in again.
Shall a man not have his spring as well as the plants?
If we dealt only with the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own.
Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild. In this sense original and independent men are wild – not tamed and broken by society.