I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.
None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.
Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
Don’t be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!
As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.
Don’t get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.
We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.
How earthy old people become – moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.
Education makes a straight ditch of a free meandering brook.
The mason asks but a narrow shelf to spring his brick from; man requires only an infinitely narrower one to spring his arch of faith from.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies.
The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
I love the broad margin to my life.
Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and Spring.