Sometimes you have to leave the world in order to learn how to live in it. Thoreau shunned society, went to the woods, and came back with a new under….

The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor that we loiter about t….

Everything counts for gain when we are cosmically awake. Nothing counts, unless we are awake. No enjoyments last, no successes satisfy, no gains have….

But they who are unconcerned about the consequences of their actions are not therefore unconcerned about their actions..

The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate..

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?.

I am struck by the simplicity of light in the atmosphere in the autumn, as if the earth absorbed none, and out of this profusion of dazzling light ca….

To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental and….

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities wher….

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels..

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake..

I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food; that a man may use as simple a d….

What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind..

The faultfinder will find faults even in paradise..

When it's time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived..

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow..

I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer an….

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and un….

The monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead. The Pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided to them; the living fact commemorates….

The devil finds work for idle hands..