Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.

I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

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.

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.

Friends are made for caring and sharing. Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.