And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, wi….

In 1848, Thoreau went to jail for refusing, as a protest against the Mexican war, to pay his poll tax. When RW Emerson came to bail him out, Emerson ….

When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacre….

In a world of peace and love, music would be the universal language..

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body..

In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer ni….

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient f….

The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it..

What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues..

We cannot put a noose around another man's neck without first hanging ourselves..

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practica….

Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them..

But what is quackery? It is commonly an attempt to cure the diseases of a man by addressing his body alone. There is need of a physician who shall mi….

In war, in some sense, lies the very genius of law. It is law creative and active; it is the first principle of the law. What is human warfare but ju….

You never gain something but that you lose something..

And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass..

You must speak loud to those who are hard of hearing..

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to ….

What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own..

When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves..

A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to….