Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, “One world at a time.”
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
This world is but a canvas for our imagination.
In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – sending back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.
The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; I would have each one be very careful to find out and preserve his own way.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.
I was born upon thy bank, river, My blood flows in thy stream, And thou meanderest forever, At the bottom of my dream.
In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain-I find no sea room-but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore.
We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.
Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one.
Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.
I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.
A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.
The singer can easily move us to tears or laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy?