Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows..

In wildness is the preservation of the world..

I am not afraid of praise, for I have practiced it on myself..

The best poets, after all, exhibit only a tame and civil side of nature. They have not seen the west side of any mountain..

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone..

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls..

The country is an archipelago of lakes,--the lake-country of New England..

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves..

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a ….

We are all of us more or less active physiognomists..

A regular council was held with the Indians, who had come in on their ponies, and speeches were made on both sides through an interpreter, quite in t….

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heav….

I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural..

The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes an….

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest..

New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long s….

It is worth the while to detect new faculties in man,--he is so much the more divine; and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. The….

Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay ….

The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the….

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns..

We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only di….