The scholar is not apt to make his most familiar experience come gracefully to the aid of his expression.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours ... but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.