"Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone."
"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living."
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
"It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate."
"Be not simply good - be good for something."
"The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest."
"Things do not change; we change."
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
"Goodness is the only investment that never fails."
"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."
"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."
"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."
"The heart is forever inexperienced."
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
"Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around."
"Truths and roses have thorns about them."
"It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise."
