“Sell your clothes- keep your thoughts.”

“To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exlcude yourself from the true enjoyment of it.”

“When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living... I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do.”

“My life has been the poem I could have writ But I could not both live and utter it.”

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

“He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established.”

“A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.”

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

“It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.”

“The best thing a man can do for his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those schemes which he entertained when he was poor.”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.”

“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”

“Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”

“We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun,”

“A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

“The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me”

“We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads, - and then we can hardly see anything else.”

“Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.”

“How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?”

“I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse.”

“It's too late to be studying Hebrew; it's more important to understand even the slang of today.”

“Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. The shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown.”

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”