I have heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the darkness was so thick you could cut it with a knife, as the saying is...
What is peculiar in the life of a man consists not in his obedience, but his opposition, to his instincts. In one direction or another he strives to live a supernatural life.
Sincerity is a great but rare virtue, and we pardon to it much complaining, and the betrayal of many weaknesses.
Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.
We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.
We must take root; send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day.
Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it. It is golden not to have any rule at all in such a case.
To regret deeply is to live afresh.
It would be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live.
I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude.
The Slothful do not have the time to become virtuous or despicable.
I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.
Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, “One world at a time.”
Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
With all your science can you tell me how it is, and when it is, that light comes into the soul?
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause – nor any charter of immunities and rights.
The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics.
The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee.