Where there is a brave man, in the thickest of the fight, there is the post of honor.
The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.
Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail.
Go not to the object; let the object come to you.
Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which these things would be by me unavoidable.
I am amused to see from my window here how busily a man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at his puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land.
Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.
The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit; is organic and fluid to the influence of its spirit and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.
What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?
Real power is measured by how much you can let things be.
And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
There is ripe fruit over your head.
What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives.
The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.
The life without men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured, – is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.