I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics.

I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Music is the crystallization of sound.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen.

I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not truly lived.