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.

One piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.

A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,Mthat was what distinguished him.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.