Lose the world, get lost in it, and find your soul.

It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows.

I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.

It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

It is worth the while to detect new faculties in man,--he is so much the more divine; and anything that fairly excites our admiration expands us. The Indian, who can find his way so wonderfully in the woods, possesses an intelligence which the white man does not,--and it increases my own capacity, as well as faith, to observe it. I rejoice to find that intelligence flows in other channels than I knew. It redeems for me portions of what seemed brutish before.

The words of some men are thrown forcibly against you and adhere like burrs.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.