1. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

2. Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

3. The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.

4. 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 life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust.

5. If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

6. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

7. We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

8. If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

9. There is no remedy for love but to love more.

10. I can alter my life by altering my attitude. He who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.

11. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

12. The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.

13. How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

14. 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 he hears, however measured or far away.

15. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

16. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.

17. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

18. I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

19. It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

20. Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.

21. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

22. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

23. Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

24. Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

25. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

26. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

27. The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

28. The heart is forever inexperienced.

29. Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

30. 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 pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

31. I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that 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.

32. There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

33. What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

- Familiar Letters

34. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

35. However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a

36. As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

37. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

38. A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

39. Faith never makes a confession.

40. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

41. Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

42. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

43. Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

44. Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

45. I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

46. This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.

47. The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness.

48. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.

49. Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.

50. It is not worth the while to let our imperfections disturb us always.

51. It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.

52. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

53. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

54. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through w

55. We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.

56. True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

57. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

58. Amid a world of noisy, shallow actors it is noble to stand aside and say, ‘I will simply be.’

59. 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 unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

60. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

61. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

62. Renew thyself completely each day.

63. The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

64. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

65. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

- Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

66. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

67. You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

68. An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

69. My greatest skill has been to want but little.

70. The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

71. When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.

72. Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

73. What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

74. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

75. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

76. I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don’t get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

77. 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.

78. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

79. Life in us is like the water in a river.

80. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

81. ‘Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.

82. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.

83. If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.

84. Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.

85. Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

86. I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

- Walden

87. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.

88. What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?

89. Friends… they cherish one another’s hopes. They are kind to one another’s dreams.

90. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

91. I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

92. 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.

93. It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious.

94. That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.

95. I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

96. It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

97. None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.

98. To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

99. Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

100. It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

101. Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

102. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

103. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

104. I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

105. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

106. I make myself rich by making my wants few.

107. We are born as innocents. We are polluted by advice.

108. If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

109. I heartily accept the motto, “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

110. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.

111. The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

112. Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

113. Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

114. Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

115. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

116. Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

117. There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.