It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.

I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.

Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.