Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves..

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately..

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say noth….

It is a very true and expressive phrase, "He looked daggers at me," for the first pattern and prototype of all daggers must have been a glance of the….

I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual..

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even t….

Unlike the Concord, the Merrimack is not a dead but a living stream, though it has less life within its waters and on its banks. It has a swift curre….

Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and through her, God..

Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in whic….

Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable..

We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we mus….

But government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men understand it..

Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are ofte….

I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes ….

There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite..

Every man is entitled to come to Cattle-Show, even a transcendentalist; and for my part I am more interested in the men than in the cattle..

Stuff a cold and starve a cold are but two ways. They are the two practices, both always in full blast. Yet you must take the advice of the one schoo….

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upo….

Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now..

In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead..

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water isbeing warmed more r….