So near along life's stream are the fountains of innocence and youth making fertile its sandy margin; and the voyageur will do well to replenish his vessels often at these uncontaminated sources.

I think that every town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses - a common possession for instruction and recreation.

Beware of any profession for which you must buy new clothes.

I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful - while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with - he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?