The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get...

Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

As for Doing-good…I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, — a vital spot on the lake’s surface, — laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg,...

The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man’s art.

It is a very remarkable and significant fact that though no man is quite well or healthy yet every one believes practically that health is the rule & disease the exception.

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

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

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.

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 indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.

The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.

for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.

The fate of the country… does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

It’s too late to be studying Hebrew; it’s more important to understand even the slang of today.

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.

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.

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains...

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

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

My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.

Your church is a baby-house made of blocks.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from...

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord,...

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man — a sort of breeding in...

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. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object....

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental...

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

The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less...

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

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

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

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

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 eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some...

As for Doing-good,that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried itfairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agreewith my constitution. Probably I should not consciously and deliberatelyforsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands ofme, to save the universe from annihilation;...

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand...

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual...

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

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.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.