“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

“My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks.”

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

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

“Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”

“Under a goverment which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison”

“Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!”

“Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?”

“I love a broad margin to my life.”

“Silence is the communing of a conscious soul with itself.”

“I turned my face more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.”

“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.”

“We have become the tool of our tools.”

“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.”

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel the cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.”

“I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more."

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of feeble minds”

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

“You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body”

“What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

“A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.”