The most alive is the wildest.
What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!
To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.
Oh, one world at a time!
It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.
I once found a kernel of corn in the middle of a deep wood by Walden, tucked in behind a lichen on a pine, about as high as my head, either by a crow or a squirrel. It was a mile at least from any corn-field.
For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it.
One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then.
I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters?
Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.
Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.
A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
The stars are the apexes of what triangles!
A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.
That virtue we appreciate is as much ours as another s. We see so much only as we possess.
There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.
In Adam’s fall We sinned all. In the new Adam’s rise, We shall all reach the skies.