The perception of beauty is a moral test.

I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.

You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of sea-slime.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to our progress. Our life is frittered away by detail. I say let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand. And keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality.