I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.
We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.
My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking-places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in nature.
Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creation.
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.
Cultivate the habit of early rising. It is unwise to keep the head long on a level with the feet.
I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Being is the great explainer.
Your religion is where your love is.
It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful, and gives birth to imagination.
A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.
When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.
I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.
Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.