In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.

The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to...

Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

One definition of man is ”an intelligence served by organs.”

Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.

Things have their laws as well as men; things refuse to be trifled with.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Lawyers are a prudent race though not very fond of liberty

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual

Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

I awoke with devout thanksgiving for my friends.

The next thing to saying a good thing yourself, is to quote one.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

In creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenism in Christianity, the periodic “revivals,” the Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of

There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement

A man is related to all nature.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to...

Thought is the property of those only who can entertain it. –

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,—’Come out unto...

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may...

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is...

Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and...

Be an opener of doors

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change...

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.

For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible

The individual is always mistaken

The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.

We must be courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light

Every advantage has its tax.