The boatmen appeared to lead an easy and contented life, and we thought that we should prefer their employment ourselves to many professions which ar….

We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones….

To see wild life you must go forth at wild season..

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civiliz….

Every man must walk to the beat of his own drummer..

All these sounds, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evidence of nature's health orsound state..

I never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud-puddle; he comes out honor-bright from behind every storm. Let us then take side….

For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... but what beside safe….

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way ..

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution..

The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do..

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 p….

A bore is someone who takes away my solitude and doesn't give me companionship in return..

So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the ….

How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden..

I do not remember anything which Confucius has said directly respecting man's "origin, purpose, and destiny." He was more practical than that. He is ….

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Natur….

Things don't change. We change..

No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing.... Yet what w….

The philosopher's conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men's, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life.….

The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day..