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

To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

I am a citizen of the world first, and of this country at a later and more convenient hour.

Asked whether or not he believed in an afterlife, Thoreau quipped, "One world at a time."

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.