Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.
The soul grows by subtraction, not addition.
It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.
Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
The biggest happiness is when at the end of the year you feel better than at the beginning.
Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told.
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.
Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.
They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.
When you knock, ask to see God – none of the servants.
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.
The voice of nature is always encouraging.
I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.
Write while the heat is in you.
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
The highest condition of art is artlessness.
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.