We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

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

The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys which cling by their tails - aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond the hunter's reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were a prehensile tail.

New York has her wilderness within her own borders; and though the sailors of Europe are familiar with the soundings of her Hudson, and Fulton long since invented the steamboat on its waters, an Indian is still necessary to guide her scientific men to its headwaters in the Adirondack country.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?