This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

With what infinite & unwearied expectation and proclamations the cocks usher in every dawn, as if there had never been one before.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

As the sun went down, I saw a solitary boatman disporting on the smooth lake. The falling dews seemed to strain and purify the air, and I was soothed with an infinite stillness. I got...

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of...

We are more of the earth,Farther from heaven these days.

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise...

None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.

Simplify, simplify.

Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As...

Morning brings back the heroic ages. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable season of...

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here – the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but...

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,...

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of...

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows

There is a low mist in the woods—It is a good day to study lichens.

I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.

Any fool can make a ruleAnd any fool will mind it.

As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements;’ there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his...

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn...

There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, and not a grain more. … A man sees only what concerns him.

Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.

Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not...

Man wanted a home, a place for warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

I am thinking by what long discipline and at what cost a man learns to speak simply at last.

Life in us is like the water in a river.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two...

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem....

There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of ‘expediency.’ There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our...

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time...

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity....