A gun will give you the body, not the bird.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness revea….

Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but perm….

I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial Empire, then som….

What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more im….

I am too easily contented with a slight and almost animal happiness. My happiness is a good deal like that of the woodchucks..

The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth..

There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain..

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speec….

I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises.... While my townsmen and women are devoted in somany ways to the go….

Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th,1847..

The next day the Indian told me their name for this light,--artoosoq',--and on my inquiring concerning the will-o'-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, ….

Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house..

In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn..

The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for his defense, but the toughest son ofearth and of Heaven,….

I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me..

While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live onl….

Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody..

It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and prep….

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead.... It is a….

It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the ….